


maybe when the summer ends

by charactershoes



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Road Trips, Schrodinger's Canon Compliancy, The Magical Mystery Tour of Richie Tozier’s Childhood Trauma, aka it's canon if you want it to be you joyless bastard, baby gays bev and richie, background Bev/Kay, past Bev/Bill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:08:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21989290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charactershoes/pseuds/charactershoes
Summary: summer, 1992. six weeks before he moves away Richie splits his lip, wrecks his bike, goes to the beach, and prepares to forget.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 60
Kudos: 247





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> me: I will never watch these scary scary movies and that's a promise 
> 
> also me: here's 25k 
> 
> anyway this is generally canon-compliant, except that Bev returns to Derry each summer and regains her memory for that time. the Losers are all around 16 here.
> 
> title is from "better" by mallrat. other songs referenced this chapter are "breed" and "drain me" by Nirvana. 
> 
> (content warnings: vomit, blood, a LOT of questionable drug/alcohol usage as a coping mechanism this chapter. there is also use of a homophobic slur and a somewhat disturbing description of an AIDS patients. both are pulled from a real 1982 queer activist magazine and are intended to reclaim/shock, but I want readers to be prepared as it is somewhat jarring to read without warning. see End Notes for more context)

It’s the third day of summer and everyone’s high, but Richie’s on another level kind of high. The kind of high where his Piece of Shit Brain starts playing elaborate games of free association, like a relentless improv group with a lot of unresolved childhood trauma. Like, _okay we’re in a spaceship and the dog can talk and Space Paul Bunyan keeps calling you a queer._ Like, _okay you’re at a fancy restaurant and your best friend keeps screaming at you not to fucking touch him. Yes, and, motherfucker._

He thinks he’s hiding it okay, but only because he’s in the presence of less experienced drug-takers like Ben and Stan, who have been arguing for an impassioned fifteen minutes about _Watership Down_ which Richie thinks is a book about birds or maybe rabbits, but he can’t remember which.

Then he feels sorry for thinking about birds, because his brain launches into another miserable improv skit. He thinks _bird_ and then he’s thinking about the bird that struck the window last week—the surprising heft of its body against the glass, the strange _smack_ of it. And that makes him think of the noise Eddie’s arm made when he set it. These days, Richie’s Piece of Shit Brain is just a long and elaborate Rube Goldberg machine—easily triggered, crescendoing always to the strange rasp of bone against bone.

Which is why he’s gotten frighteningly high, a combined effort of Bev’s aunt’s weed and the painkillers Eddie stole from his medicine cabinet.

“You broke your arm,” Bev says suddenly. For a terrified second Richie thinks he’s spoken aloud, but Bev’s hand is still carding absently through his hair and her eyes are on Eddie. “You broke your arm, didn’t you, Eddie?”

Eddie is too engaged in a furious game of cards with Bill to do anything but nod tersely, lift his arm as if to say, _look Ma no cast_.

“Look, Ma, no cast,” Richie says, mostly just an effort to get Eddie to glance their way. It fails. He turns his head in Bev’s lap to look up into her face, observing familiar freckles and coppery eyelashes. “In the Neibolt house. The floor was rotting.”

“The Neibolt house,” Bev says slow, and Richie watches the words register on her face. “Shit. I forgot- There was- Why were we in there?”

Memory creeps in slower than it used to. Slower each summer, Richie thinks, that Bev comes back. That first summer, she stepped out of her aunt’s van and remembered all at once.

“Puked all over my new hightops,” she told them sorrowfully, having burst into the clubhouse and startled them all so bad that Eddie flung a broken paddleboard at her out of sheer instinct. “It was like a cork came out.”

This is the third summer Bev’s come back, and this time it took her two days to show up at Richie’s door, and even then she’d only stared at him warily, said, “This is gonna sound crazy, but I know you, right? We know each other?”

“Eds was looking for used needles,” Richie says, pitches his voice louder for Eddie’s benefit because even the weed and the two pills stolen from Mrs. Kaspbrak’s medicine cabinet can’t silence the _look at me look at me look at me_ that beats like a pulse. “Trying to bulk up on vaccines, right, Eds? Herd immunity?"

“That’s not what _fucking_ herd immunity is, Richie, and maybe if you ever went to a general fucking practitioner, you wouldn’t have gotten the flu last year and ralphed in the middle of assembly.”

Richie closes his eyes and smiles beatifically. “Your mom plays doctor with me every night, Eddie my boy, and we do more than just some general fucking—“

“Beep, beep, Richie,” Bev says, and then laughs like she’s surprised. Her hand spreads over Richie’s mouth. “Shit, I forgot that, too.”

“It was Georgie,” Ben says quietly, because someone’s got to and it won’t be Bill. “We were looking for Georgie.”

Richie keeps his eyes closed so he doesn’t have to watch _that_ particular memory play out across Bev’s face. It gets harder every year to tell the story, to fill the gaps in Bev’s memory satisfactorily. They are forgetting, too, Richie thinks. A slower forgetting, like a creeping rot.

Which is why they are all high, crammed into their childhood clubhouse. It loosens up the memories. That’s Bill’s theory, anyway. Richie’s just happy to blast his brain apart and let someone pet his hair for a while.

Bevs says, “Christ.”

Bill says, dry, “Yeah.”

A silence. Another dissatisfactory gap—Bev and Bill. Bev who goes away and forgets, Bill who stays and remembers. Last summer they fell back together easy enough into a chummy, sexless kind of puppy love. This summer, Bill plays round after furious round of cards with Eddie while Bev pets Richie’s hair. Maybe she hasn’t even remembered that bit yet—the Bill and Bev of it all.

“Bev, just a couple more important reminders,” he tells her face, which is mostly chin and nostrils from this angle. “You guys call me Big Dick Tozier, on account of my—“

“Intact virginity,” Stan says loudly.

“Also you and me are passionate lovers. Maybe you haven’t remembered that part yet—“

Bill mumbles something about repressed trauma, but Richie just puckers his face up at Bev in his best imitation of that Slutty Fish from Pinocchio. She laughs, swoops suddenly down and smacks a wet kiss on his mouth, then another on the lens of his glasses.

“Missed you, Trashmouth,” she says fondly. Then, like she’s just remembered, “Mike! Where’s Mike?”

This causes a round of uproarious laughter while Richie yells in dismay about common decency and emotional infidelity and how Mike could cradle them both in his capable arms. He maybe loses the plot a little bit. Bev puts her hand back over his mouth, a fond muffler. Richie thinks about licking her hand but her fingernails are painted sparkle-purple and abruptly he is so fond of her. Like maybe he’d forgotten, too, a bit.

“He doesn’t smoke,” Bill is answering belatedly. “S-sssays the last thing he needs is the Derry Police smelling it on him.”

“Christ,” Bev says again. “Derry. I forgot.”

“Lucky you,” Stan says, and Richie’s mind supplies: bird against window, bone against bone.

The left lens of his glasses is still fogged with Bev’s breath, sticky with her mouth, and he thinks maybe he’d find it erotic if his body wasn’t so far away from his brain. He finds especially well-drawn CPR posters erotic most days, but right now he can’t actually sit up. It takes several seconds of concerted effort to get his hands to lift, to fumble at his glasses.

He is, very possibly, too high.

“-go by tomorrow, though,” Ben is saying. “He’ll want to see you. He was- We’re all glad you’re back.”

“Mike,” Bevs is saying, wondering. “I can’t believe I- all of you, I can’t believe I could-“

“It’s not your fault.” Stan’s good, steady voice. “It’s the- It’s Derry. It’s not you.”

“Oh, fuck’s sake.” Eddie’s voice, exasperated. Then Eddie’s hands, plucking Richie’s glasses away. Richie cranes his neck, trying to track the motion, but Eddie’s already hovering over him again. “Stop squirming before I poke your eye out.”

Richie goes still, feeling strangely moved. Eddie settles the clean glasses back over his face, pinched fingers touching very briefly against the bridge of Richie’s nose, between his brows.

“Thank you, Eds” Richie says politely.

For some reason, this seems to incense Eddie further because he throws a couple playing cards at Richie and disappears from his limited line of sight. Richie misses him at once—cantankerous mouth and hair curling from the trapped humidity of this place. He thinks, _don’t forget that_.

He says, “Eddie?”

“What?”

“Just checking.”

A sudden urgency, then, to memorize all of this—Stan’s foot dangling gracefully from the hammock and Ben laying on the floor below, occasionally tugging at Stan’s foot to set him swinging. Bill cheating brazenly at cards while Eddie’s not looking, his hands moving without falter.

“Rich,” Bev protests when he lurches upright like some reanimated zombie. And, nope, that’s not a thought he can entertain. His glasses are fastidiously clean, thanks to Eddie, but the air swims before him and he has a panicked thought _it’s happening already it’s happening right in front of me_. The Forgetting.

Whatever’s happening on his face makes Ben stand, and watching him straighten to his full height is like a bit of a funhouse mirror magic because _wow_ when did Ben get so tall? Richie is glad of his size right then because he doesn’t actually know if he can stand on his own, but Ben gets him out into the June night easy enough.

“Put your head between your knees,” Ben says.

Richie tries to say something like, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” or maybe something about training to suck his own dick, but he actually thinks he might black out and Ben’s hand is a friendly weight at the back of his neck, so he doesn’t say any of that stuff. He just sits down in the grass and puts his head between his knees.

Ben very charitably makes some remarks about how it was too hot down there and how it’s much nicer out here anyway, like maybe Richie is just having a Victorian Woman Fainting Spell and not a drug-induced panic attack.

Eventually, he manages, “When’d you get so fucking tall, Ben?”

“I’m having a growth spurt,” Ben says. “My legs hurt _all_ the time. My dad was tall, but I was starting to think it skipped a generation.”

Richie forgets sometimes that Ben’s dad is dead—forgets sometimes that people can die from regular, pedestrian things like war or cancer, like Eddie’s dad. He wonders if he’ll start being afraid of all those regular things once he moves away and forgets, wonders what it’d be like to lay awake at night in fear of multiplying cells or, like, car accidents.

“Crazy about Bev,” he says, for something to say.

“I don’t know,” Ben says. “It’s crazier when she’s away. Doesn’t it feel right? All of us together?”

Richie can’t answer because he’s busy shutting his eyes as tight as he can, because Ben’s right and because nine months out of the year there’s a feeling of absence—a missing tooth, right in the back, not painful so much as strange—that doesn’t go away until Bev comes back. He wonders if she feels that absence, too, and just doesn’t know how to name it.

“Richie?”

“Down here,” he says as heartily as he can manage, voice muffled in his own dirty jeans. “I’m _this_ close to sucking my own dick, Ben.”

“Gross,” Ben says. And then, nonsensically, “You’re okay, Richie.”

Richie’s body has a very strange response to being told he’s okay—like one of those Pull My Finger gags, except way less funny and more pathetic because all of a sudden he starts to cry a little. He keeps his face buried between his knees and if Ben notices that his shoulders are shuddering a bit, he’s too much of a gentleman to remark.

…

Richie’s house is past Eddie’s and Bev’s apartment is even farther, and so the majority of Richie’s adolescent summer nights have ended with the three of them walking home together, long shadows cutting through the half-moons of the streetlights. And before Bev, it was Richie and Eddie—wheeling their bikes and talking over each other, or pedaling with urgency when it was close to curfew and Eddie’s mother was waiting up.

Eddie’s mother still waits up, but she and Eddie seem to be engaged in increasingly open warfare, waged across the battleground of Eddie’s body. It goes like this: Eddie comes home late, Mrs. Kaspbrak cries. Eddie comes home with his knees skinned, Mrs. Kaspbrak worries about skin cancer and ups his dermatologist appointments to bimonthly. Most recently, Eddie steals oxy from the medicine cabinet and comes home smelling like weed. The next move is Mrs. Kaspbrak’s. Maybe she’ll have him fitted for braces.

“Your teeth are already straight,” he tells Eddie, who is grimly holding his hand.

“Walk straight,” he says. “You’re fucking meandering.”

Richie endeavors to walk in a straight line, pressing heel to toe, and almost falls off the curb. Eddie hauls him back, overcorrects so Richie goes crashing into him. His chin collides painfully with Eddie’s skull and there’s a brief and wonderful second where the whole word smells like Eddie’s shampoo.

“Oranges,” says Richie, delighted.

“You’re trashed,” Eddie says.

“Trash the trashmouth,” Bev says, fondly. “Same old Richie.”

The sidewalk’s not wide enough for three, so she’s walking in the road—a few paces behind, so she can smoke a cigarette without offending Eddie. They haven’t passed a single car; at night, Derry is quiet and vacant, and they move through it unnoticed. Richie thinks about those tiny birds that live on the back of crocodiles.

“How’d you get so fucking high,” Eddie gripes. “It’s a midlevel painkiller. Didn’t you ever get your tonsils out?”

Richie ignores him because Eddie knows that, no, Richie’s never had his tonsils out because Eddie knows everything about Richie and also could probably recite the collective medical history of the Losers if he wanted to. He turns back to Bev, feeling perturbed. Eddie yanks him back around.

“ _Walk_ , Richie—“

“Not exactly the same,” Richie protests, craning his neck to appeal to Bev, “right? I got tall as fuck, Bev. I have a chin now. Eddie’s a low-level drug dealer.”

“It’s not dealing if they’re technically _prescribed_ to me—“

“Okay, well that’s definitely not true,” Bev says.

“Last month I fingered Annie Wembley, remember her?”

“In the bowling alley bathroom stall.” Eddie tugs at Richie some more. “For all of two minutes.”

“Yeah, ‘cause that’s all it _took_.”

“I meant it as a good thing,” Bev says. “It’s bad enough trying to remember everything as it is. Don’t go changing on me, Trashmouth, okay?”

Richie’s head does the bird against window thing again, and if Eddie didn’t have his hand in such a viselike grip he might stop walking entirely. He loses time for a little bit, drifting in and out of conscious thought, which is nicer than having to think about things changing and things staying the same.

“The school’s that way,” Eddie is telling Bev, indicating a stretch of half-lit street. “And that way’s town. The movie theater, the pharmacy.”

“The pharmacy,” Bev repeats quietly. “There’s a kid outside. Looks like someone killed him.”

Richie knows she’s smiling just from the tilt of her voice. He is glad Bev is here. He closes his eyes and lets Eddie lead him, tries to find comfort in walking the sidewalk they’ve always walked, like they might’ve have lived this very night a hundred times already.

“Is your mom,” Bev ventures, “still-”

“The same.”

“But you’re okay?”

“I’m always okay,” Eddie says. “That’s what she can’t get over.”

“But everything- All of it. From that summer. It hasn’t—“

“No,” Eddie says.

A quiet noise, like breath between teeth, that Richie thinks is Bev shivering. She says, “It’s- hard to remember specifics. I remember being afraid. Afraid all the time, that summer.”

“It’s okay,” Eddie says, because it turns out Eddie is generally a very reasonable and sympathetic person when he isn’t being antagonized to the point of apoplectic fit. “I’d forget too, if I could.”

Then, “Are your _eyes_ closed, asshole?”

Richie opens his eyes guiltily and for a minute the night is shifting and funny, and Bev’s hair is cropped like it was that summer and Eddie’s face is as soft and young as it was that summer. And then the dark and light reassemble themselves, and they’re sixteen again. He feels unwell.

“—not your seeing eye dog,” Eddie is saying.

Richie lets go of his hand and staggers into the patchy grass, crouches and thrusts his fingers into the back of his throat, retches experimentally.

“Rich, we weren’t drinking,” Bev says.

She’s right, but he tries again anyway because he feels strange and tilting and too high to articulate that.

“That’s not gonna help, honey.” She’s crouching down next to him now, wrapping a familiar hand around his wrist. With her other hand she grips the back of his neck, like Ben had earlier, and digs her nails in. “It’s just a bad trip, that’s all. You want a cigarette?”

Nothing’s really happening except that Richie’s drooling down his fingers and all the gagging is making his eyes fill with tears again, so he gives up. Sits back on his heels and spits a couple times, lets his eyes close.

“Cigarettes help sometimes,” Bev says.

“Eds will yell at me.”

“I will fucking not,” Eddie begins hotly, then makes an attempt to monitor his tone. “I’ll make an exception this once, but only because my mother’s gonna call a hotline if I’m not back soon.”

“I’ll give her a hot line,” Richie mumbles, but he gets to his feet and lets Bev nudge him back to the sidewalk. Eddie reaches for his hand, but Richie dodges. “‘M all slobbery.”

“I’ll survive,” Eddie says tightly, takes his hand.

Bev lights a cigarette, takes a slow drag and then puts it to Richie’s mouth. She’s right—it helps. His breathing steadies and it feels a bit like every rattling mousetrap in his brain has already been sprung for tonight, so there’s nothing left to think about except his breath and Eddie holding his damp right hand.

At Eddie’s house, the front window burns ominously bright.

“Well, bye,” he says, robustly casual.

“Want us to wait?” Bev asks, but Eddie’s already shaking his head, halfway up the porch steps. The house seems to go huge and distended before them, the roof craning its neck to get a look at them, the dark windows like dilated pupils taking in all the light. There are a lot of things Richie doesn’t say to Eddie, and this is one of them: _don’t go in_.

They watch until he disappears into the house, wait a little longer until the light goes on in an upstairs window, and then they wait some more.

“It’s weird,” Bev says, still watching the window. “I’m still trying to remember you all, but you feel _right._ “

“Ben said that, too,” Richie says.

“Smart guy, that Ben,” Bev says. She links her arm through Richie’s and they leave the Kaspbrak house behind. “Tall.”

“I’m tall,” Richie says inconsequentially.

He finishes his cigarette and she lights another, passing it between them. They reach the corner of Richie’s street and stand there a while, finishing the cigarette and lingering in each other’s company.

“Are your parents going to be angry?”

He shakes his head. “They don’t care.”

“You’re okay?”

“I’m great,” Richie says. “When am I not great?”

“You’ll feel better tomorrow,” she says, like she doesn’t believe him.

She offers to walk him to his door, but Richie shakes his head and performs a series of field sobriety tests—all of which he fails—and says something about being ridden hard and put away wet which leaves Bev suitably disgusted. She goes up on her toes, kisses him hard on the cheek, and stands at the corner waving until he reaches his driveway, crosses the yard, steps over the FOR SALE BY HOMEOWNERS sign, and lets himself into the dark house.

…

He sleeps like a dead thing, wakes dry-mouthed and disoriented on the living room couch, which means that last night he probably (very wisely) decided he wasn’t brave enough to try the stairs. He can’t actually remember anything past leaving Bev at the corner, but he applauds Unhinged Richie for this mature and responsible decision.

“You know I never thought so before,” says his father, “but from this angle you really do have a bit of an overbite.”

Richie closes his mouth. He does some more mature and responsible decision making, weighing whether turning his head will make him barf. He decides that it won’t; this is why he likes drugs better than drinking. He turns his head.

His father is established in his disgusting plaid armchair with a stack of newspapers and a fishing show on television. He’s considering Richie with the same distant interest the fisherman on TV is considering a parasitic fish.

“If you make me get braces,” Richie says, feeling that this is the beginning of the rest of his life as a mature and responsible decision-maker, “I’ll fucking kill myself.”

His father bobs his head like he’s weighing this point. “The big move is already a point of contention,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to further disturb my very sensitive son.”

Richie turns back to the TV because he’s just remembered that he isn’t actually meant to be talking to his father. It’s been six days since his parents announced they were selling the dental practice and moving to the Cape and that Richie _would_ be coming with them, meaning it’s been six days since he’s said a word to either of them.

Having received a tick in the Distraction To Others column on every report card since the first grade, Not Talking is just about the biggest gun in Richie’s holster. His parents were just starting to get genuinely concerned, and now he’s blown it all on a flimsy threat of suicide.

“It’s probably too late for dental intervention anyway,” his father continues musing, craning his neck to get another look at Richie’s very dry, very foul-tasting mouth. “Your jaw is pretty fully-formed, for better or for worse.”

Then he tosses a stack of papers to land on Richie’s chest—all the movie reviews and comics from about a month’s worth of _Derry Gazette_ s. Ordinarily Richie would find this condescending and further proof that his dad doesn’t know him at all, but today it makes him feel kinda touched and also sort of deeply despairing. He knows he’s probably already late for whatever Welcome Home Bev hangout Ben was talking about last night, but some part of him thinks it’d be nice to sit here with his father and watch fishing television and read Calvin and Hobbes until the living room gets dark and they have to turn on the lamps and start talking about dinner.

Like being twelve all over again, faking sick because Henry Bowers said if he saw Richie at school today he’d break his nose, watching melancholy daytime TV until Eddie came with Richie’s homework and stood outside the door, yelling about airborne contagion and how Bowers had chased him for three blocks and could Richie bring him water, but _not_ tap water—only an unopened bottle and if he didn’t have that then never mind, he would just stay dehydrated.

It gives Richie that bad feeling from last night, like he might’ve lived this day a hundred times already. It’s not the familiarity that bothers him. It’s the idea that it’s going to end.

He says, “Think Moms is gonna let you bring the chair? Bet she orchestrates a hit, eh? Pays the movers a little extra to let it take a fall off the back of the truck, eh?”

“If that’s meant to be a mobster voice,” his father says, “you need a little more than just saying ‘eh’ at the end of each sentence. You’re verging dangerously on Canadian.”

“Like Canadians can’t be fucking mobsters,” Richie mumbles, offended.

“Wait ’til you hear an authentic Boston accent,” his father says. “Even _you’ll_ think it’s too broad.”

He says it casual enough, but Richie recognizes it for what it is—another bribe. A whole new room to decorate just how you like, Moms had said. A fancy high school with a thriving Audio Visual program, Dad had said. Lobsters, Moms had said, getting desperate.

“I can’t be bought with regional accents,” Richie says, sitting up and letting the stack of newspapers slide to the floor.

“Nobody’s trying to buy you, Rich.” He puts down his newspaper and considers Richie, weirdly serious. “I thought you hated it here.”

For all the _look at me look at me look at me_ antics that Richie goes through, he never knows how to react once he’s actually got someone’s eyes on him. He’s really good at talking and not very good at saying what he means. 

For some reason, he thinks of Eddie. Eddie stooping to gently kiss his mother’s waiting cheek. Eddie standing before his front door, preparing himself to step inside. Eddie, going home faithfully every night and hating it there. That’s how Richie feels about Derry.

“I don’t want things to change,” he says eventually, and it comes out so horribly sincere that he has to fix his eyes determinedly on the television, where a fish is being relieved of its skeleton.

Unexpectedly, his dad laughs. “Yeah, welcome to adulthood, kiddo.”

 _Welcome to the Losers Club, asshole_ , says Richie’s Piece of Shit Brain. He stands, feeling prickly and misunderstood and altogether too sober.

“I’m not talking to you,” he informs his father, and goes upstairs to brush his teeth and search for weed among his heaps of dirty laundry and stacks of untouched boxes, waiting expectantly to be filled.

…

Richie goes to Ben’s house and knocks until Ben’s mom directs him to Mike’s. He takes the long ride to Mike’s mostly standing on his pedals, because his trusty bike is an aged and rattling thing and there’s no plush left in the bicycle seat. Probably he could get a new bike out of this Big Move thing if he milks it hard enough, but Richie feels traitorous even thinking that.

It’s bright and warm, fitting weather for the fourth day of summer, and Richie tries to summon that Top of the Rollercoaster feeling—like he’s standing on the peak of summer, like he’s staring down a hundred sunny days just like this one—but it won’t come.

He can’t decide if that’s the onset of adulthood or the onset of The Forgetting or if this is just how it feels to come down from drugs. He leaves his bike crashed at the end of Mike’s dirt drive, follows the shouts of laughter to a back barn whose structural soundness Richie is _sure_ Eddie has already cast aspersions about.

“Oh, good, Richie’s here,” Ben says, which is nice. Richie loves Ben. “He’ll do it.”

“Anything with a pulse,” Richie agrees brightly. He takes them in—Stan and Bill sprawled across a musty blanket in the big square of sun cast through the open barn doors, Mike and Bev wrestling with what seems to be a length ofprickly, knotted rope. “Where’s Eds?”

“Richie,” Stan says very seriously, “they’re going to try and use your attention-seeking nature for their personal gain. This is an opportunity for growth. Say no.”

“Richie,” says Bev brightly, “wanna do something fun?”

“You have to stop believing in me so much, Stanley,” Richie yells down, once he’s climbed up into the hayloft and shimmied out onto a rafter, feeling like an adventurer with the length of rope coiled around his arm. “I hate disappointing you.”

“No, you d-d-fucking don’t,” Bill yells back, but he’s laughing.

“It’s true.” Richie considers his own hanging legs, which look particularly spindly and white and, like, hairy from this angle. “I love Stan’s sexy little disappointed face. He looks just like Rabbi Uris.”

“This is such a bad idea,” Stanley says again, paging idly through a comic in his classic I Refuse to Reward You With Attention, Richie manner. “Richie can’t tie a knot. He dropped out of the temple Boy Scouts troop.”

“He was asked to leave,” Bill corrects.

“Let me guess,” Mike says. “You went fishing and he made too many jokes about _rods_.”

“He p-pretended to drown during the swimming certification.”

“Don’t listen to him, Rich,” Bev yells up. “You have the spirit of an adventurer. The heart of an outdoorsman.”

“A dick like a horse,” Richie yells down.

It’s true that he never got his scout certification in knot-tying, but Richie’s irreparably tangled a lot of shoelaces in his day. He loops the rope around the rafter a few times, does some very complicated weaving, then ties it off. He lets the other end of the rope slide off his arm, coiling to the barn floor far below.

“Should I shimmy down?” he yells. “Stan, look, no hands.”

He doesn’t actually let go of the rafter, but only because he knows Stanley won’t look up. The rest of the Losers are gathered below him, though, faces upturned with the kind of undivided attention that Richie can’t resist.

“You’re gonna get splinters in your ass,” Ben says.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Benny?”

He kicks off his dangling sneakers one by one, letting them fall to the ground like a high stakes striptease. Eddie appears in the doorway of the barn just in time to dodge Richie’s left shoe.

“Augh!” says Eddie, which is Richie’s favorite sound in the entire world. He’s grinning big as he toes off his socks, watches Eddie go through the stages of grief as his eyes chart the fallen sock, the hanging rope, Richie’s dangling legs.

“Motherfuck,” Eddie says.

“We tried to stop him,” Bill says weakly.

“Next is my shirt,” Richie threatens. “Stanley, I’m taking my shirt off.”

Stan licks his finger, turns the page of his comic.

Richie’s body grows in strange and bony directions every day, so he doesn’t actually trust his center of gravity enough to attempt any further disrobing. He shimmies backwards until he can swing his legs back down into the hayloft, jumps the last three rungs of the ladder to applause from everyone except Stanley and Eddie.

“We’re making a swing,” Mike tells Eddie belatedly.

“Wholesome summer fun,” Bev says, “because I’m sick of playing _do you remember_? It’s worse than when my aunt makes me go to therapy.”

“Fuh- _fuck_ therapy,” Bill says fervently.

Bev grins at him briefly, head close to Ben’s as they knot the bottom of the rope into a knobby little seat. The sun through the barn door lights her hair golden, and Bill looks uncertain in a rare way. It makes Richie feel twitchy and eager to diffuse the tension. He gets an arm around Eddie, who is still holding Richie’s shoe-turned-projectile.

“Get on the swing, Eds. You can have the inaugural ride.”

“You’re all dusty,” Eddie laments, shrugs him off. “Put your shoes on before you step on something sharp. I can guarantee you’re not up to date on your tetanus vaccine.”

“We do clean in here occasionally,” Mike objects mildly. He gives the rope a considering tug. “Bev has first dibs anyhow.”

Eddie steps out of Richie’s grasp and goes to join Stan on the sunlit blanket. Richie retrieves his other shoe and then trails after Eddie because it’s what he’s best at. Stan’s feigned interest in his comic seems to have morphed into genuine interest, but he looks up and smiles briefly in greeting.

“Bev brought a whole bunch,” he says, gesturing to the bright stack beside him, “from a comic shop in Portland. And some homemade stuff.”

“Zines,” Bev calls over. “Political activism shit. They’re sick!”

Stan and Eddie fall into conversation over some final issue of _The Adventures of Captain America_ that neither could find in the Derry store. Richie busies himself pulling his shoes back on, then prods Eddie with the doodled-over toe of his Converse until Eddie gets fed up and hauls Richie’s feet into his lap and ties his laces for him.

Richie holds still as Eddie ties double knots, fingers forming bunny ears from the laces, all while he argues with Stan about comic books. Richie’s lost interest in comic books over the past year, but thinking about that too much will likely send him spiraling again, because apparently growing up just means you stop loving all the things you used to love.

“Thank you, Eds,” he says, wiggles his toes. “Bet you would’ve got a badge in knot-tying.”

“My mother thinks the Boy Scouts are a socialist organization,” Eddie says distractedly, eyes on the comic he’s sharing with Stan. “You know this.”

“I do,” Richie agrees.

He sprawls back on his elbows, feet still resting in Eddie’s lap, and shuffles idly through the stack of comics. When Bill joins them on the blanket, he hands Bill an issue of _Vault of Horror._

On the cover _,_ a black figure is caught in a cone of yellow light, limbs akimbo like the light caught him in retreat, froze him mid-run. Richie’s Piece of Shit Brain tries to whisper something to him, so he grabs another horror comic at random, starts paging through it.

“Is it just me,” Bill says, speaking in the slow and careful way he’s been practicing in speech therapy, “or is everything. Weird.”

He’s watching Bev swing, feet braced against the knotted rope, one open hand grasping at the sky as she sails towards the open barn door.

“It’s been nine months,” Stan says logically, eyes on his page. “Did you think we’d all just go back to how things were?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Bill says, like he’s surprised. “It’s _us_.”

The booklet in Richie’s lap isn’t actually a comic, but a fold of grainy, Xeroxed pages. What he’d previously taken for a skeleton on the cover, is in fact an emaciated patient. The cover reads, INFECTED FAGGOT PERSPECTIVES: MERRY FUCKING XMAS & DIE-IN THE NEW YEAR!! Inside, pictures of two women embracing. A column: _Obituaries We Didn’t Want to See_.

He can’t even read the words, because his hands keep turning back to the front cover—the skeletal man, strangled in his own IV tubes. _$3.00 - FREE TO THE INFECTED._

“You’re telling me,” Bill is saying, “that everything f-f-feels. _Feels_ the same.”

“I’m saying you shouldn’t expect it to be the same,” Stan says. “We’re not thirteen anymore.”

“I just wish she’d. T-t-t-tell me. What she wants.”

Eddie says, “Stanley, I’m turning the page so you better hurry up and read.” Then, knuckles knocking against the bone in Richie’s ankle, “Why do you look like that?”

Distantly, Richie understands that this is directed at him. He puts down the zine, turns his eyes to Eddie and then has to look away because his Piece of Shit Brain hisses _free to the infected_.

“Bev brought us fuckin’ nudie magazines,” he says, and his voice is a choked and jovial thing. He imagines his mouth moving like one of those uncanny ventriloquist dolls. A hinged, flapping thing—up and down and up. “Practically centerfold, this shit."

They are terrible words. He tries to snatch up the zine, shove it back into the stack of _The Amazing Spiderman_ s and _Adventures of the Thing_ , but Stan’s hand traps the flimsy paper against the blanket. His eyes lift.

“That’s not funny, Richie,” he says, and Richie is wretched under his serious eyes. “That’s- really not fucking funny.”

Eddie’s face peers over Stan’s shoulder. His mouth moves silently as he reads the words, and Richie knows this because he’s watching Eddie’s mouth. Because he’s always watching Eddie’s mouth.

He pulls his feet out of Eddie’s lap, feeling strange and disjointed as a puppet, mumbling, “It was just a joke.”

He goes and bullies Mike into pushing him on the rope swing, scratchy fibers biting into his palms, until he’s sailing high enough to breach the barn door and swing out into the blue sky, just for a second. Then he’s falling back, Ben and Bev chasing after him, Mike’s big palms slapping down on his back, pushing him forward again.

At the very highest point of his trajectory, he jumps.

There’s a big, wide-open moment of falling and Richie thinks of Bev’s white shape, pinwheeling arms stark against the grim green quarry. He thinks of the figure on the front of _Vault of Horror_ , suspended in light. He hits the ground hard and rolls, loses his glasses, jumps up spitting dirt and blood.

“Holy _shit_ , Richie,” Bev is shouting.

He shakes himself out, finds nothing broken, puts his hand to face and finds a considerable amount of blood.

“I think I bit through my lip,” he reports, limping back through the barn doors. “I caught some serious fucking air, did you see where I landed?”

“You’re so fuh-fucking dumb.”

“Let me see,” Mike says, and takes Richie’s face in his big hands, which is a level of tenderness that Richie’s body can’t withstand. His knees nearly buckle. “Are your teeth alright?”

“My dad thinks I have an overbite,” Richie says, jerking away from Mike’s kindly ministrations. He tugs his shirt collar to press against his bleeding mouth.

“Why’d you do that?” Ben asks, bewildered, and this makes Richie laugh because he’s asking so earnestly, like he actually thinks Richie might have a good explanation for his actions. Little does he know that Richie’s brain is nothing but a complicated series of mouse traps, all easily triggered impulse and _look at me look at me look at me_.

Laughing is a weird sensation when his mouth is filling with blood, though. He ends up gagging, spitting a mouthful of blood and narrowly missing a pair of crisp white sneakers. Eddie flinches back and Richie’s Piece of Shit Brain sings _free to the infected_.

“Give him some space,” Bev directs. She takes a Kleenex from Eddie, presses it to Richie’s mouth. “He needs air.”

“I’m fucking fine,” Richie objects.

“What is _up_ with you, man?” Stan’s wearing his Actually Disappointed face, which is not delightful or funny to Richie, but instead makes him feel small and squashed like a bug.

Bev guides him out of the barn into a brightness that makes him squint and blink. Without his glasses, everything is strange and swimming. Mike brings a glass of water from the house, then he and Bev look politely away while Richie swishes it around in his mouth and spits pink water.

“Where’s Eddie?” Bev says. “Should I get him?”

Richie shakes his head, closes his eyes. “He doesn’t carry bandaids anymore. He’s rebelling against Big Pharma. That’s his mom, get it?”

“We get it,” Mike says.

“Okay,” Bev is impatient, “but shouldn’t he be showing some concern? Isn’t he your-“

Richie’s body replays the sensation of falling, the hard impact of the ground. His eyes come open. He punches out a laugh and accidentally dribbles a lot of blood down his chin.

“Aren’t you two,” Bev tries again.

“Are you concussed? Me and Eds?”

“Don’t call me that.” Eddie is a sudden vision in white sneakers. “I found your glasses. You’re lucky they’re not smashed to bits.”

He crowds right into Richie’s space like he’s unbothered by the blood, and his fingers brush at the tops of Richie’s ears when he slides his glasses back on—the lenses now as fastidiously clean as Eddie’s shoes. The world slots back into jarring focus.

“Eddie,” says Richie, feeling airless, like maybe the fall knocked the wind out of him. He wants to grab at Eddie’s wrist until he can catch his breath, but Eddie’s already moving away and both Richie’s hands are covered in his own blood. “Eddie, man, you gotta hear what Bev just said-“

“I was confused,” Bev says. “I’m still remembering stuff.”

“I heard her,” Eddie says, and he’s not seeming to find it as fucking hysterical as Richie or even really smiling at all. He makes a slightly queasy face. “Stop smiling at me. You have blood in your teeth.”

Mike takes Richie’s empty cup. “I’ll get you more water.”

“I got it,” Eddie says briskly, already grabbing the cup and starting towards the house.

“Check for bandages, too,” Bev calls after him, but Richie shakes his head, twitching away from her hands. He’s trying to smile and it just won’t take. He’s feeling increasingly hysterical and strange.

“I’m just gonna. I want to go home,” he says. “I’ll clean up there. It’s cool.”

“Richie,“ Mike says.

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Bev says, eyes big. “I really thought-“

“It’s cool,” Richie says again, somewhat desperate.

Bev gets a stubborn look like she’s gonna argue and then doesn’t, just sits down in the scratchy yellow grass and gives Richie a considering look. He has to look away; he forgot how hard and piercing Bev can look when she wants to.

“I stopped by your house this morning,” she says. “Nobody told me-”

“Richie,” Bill says, appearing in the doorway. He’s got the face on that Richie likes best—Big Bill, afire with intention, nothing slow or halting about him. “I’m gonna. Gonna go. You want to come?”

“Yes,” says Richie fervently, staggering to his feet. “Carry me home, cowboy.”

“Richie,” Bev says, like she wants to argue. Then she sighs and shoves a fistful of Kleenex into his hands. “We’ll talk later.”

“Heard that be-be-before,” Bill says, shouldering past. “Bye, Mike.”

Bev chases them down the dirt drive, where Richie stoops to retrieve his shitty old bike. “What’s that mean, Bill?”

“Never mind,” he says stonily. He grabs Richie’s bike so he can wheel it faster, mouth set.

“You want me to say I’m sorry?” Bev paces after them, furious. “I’m sorry for fucking forgetting you all. Is that what you want, Bill?”

Richie opens his mouth to say something stupid and inflammatory, and instead succeeds only in drooling a shocking amount of blood onto his shirt. Potentially he is surpassing last night’s low.

“Oh Jesus, Richie,” Bill says, and then he and Bev aren’t yelling at each other anymore. Just watching each other.

“Any time you want to talk,” Bev says finally, shoving her hands into the pockets of her overalls. “You know where I live.”

“Y-y-yeah,” Bill says. “I do.”

They leave Bev standing at the mailbox, giving them a thousand yard stare. Between her cropped hair and hunched shoulders, she looks just like the sullen guarded girl from That Summer.

“Sorry,” Bill says eventually. “That was emb- That was embarrassing.”

Richie makes a broad gesture, inviting Bill to take in his smashed-up face and bloody, slobbery shirt and, just, his entire track record as the single most embarrassing person alive. He thinks his lip has stopped bleeding, but he’s becoming increasingly aware of his sore ribs from where he landed hard on the ground.

Bill smiles begrudgingly. He ducks his chin to indicate Richie’s bike. “Want to ride pegs?”

With his hands gripping Bill’s shoulders and the wind in his hair, Richie could be any age at all. He closes his eyes against it—that slipping feeling, that ache of loving something so bad—and swallows down the taste of blood.

“You’re right,” he says thickly. He has to raise his voice and repeat himself against the tick of the bicycle wheels. “You’re right. Everything is fucking weird.”

Richie hops off the pegs as Bill turns up his driveway, like they’ve done a million times before, and he’s turning to grin at him with his bloody teeth when he sees that Bill has stopped the bike short at the end of the lawn where the FOR SALE sign stands.

“R-r- _Richie_ ,” Bill says.

“Ah, shit,” says Richie.

…

The next morning, Richie bikes over to Bev’s and they lay together on the living room rug of the little apartment her aunt rents each summer, getting tremendously stoned. Bev puts on Nirvana—because she’s the only other Loser who loves them like Richie does—and they pass a carton of orange juice between them, not talking much except to mumble along to the best lyrics. _I don’t mind, I don’t have a mind. Get away away away from your home. I’m afraid afraid afraid of a ghost._

“Can I ask you something?” Bev asks quietly. “I have to know that I’m- remembering right.”

“Okay,” says Richie, watching the ceiling fan until his eyes go dry.

“My dad,” Bev says. “Was he- He hurt me.”

It’s not a question. Richie nods and then rolls over on the rug to consider Bev’s profile—her rosy cheeks and Nancy Drew ski slope nose. Sometimes he forgets how wholesome she looks, like his brain can’t reconcile her appearance with the solid steel inside—a girl who throws herself off cliffs, chops her hair off rather than let someone get a grip on her.

“Yeah,” he says. “You didn’t tell us a lot, but we- knew.”

Bev nods, eyes on the ceiling, and doesn’t answer for a while. Richie tongues against his swollen lip, tasting copper, and waits.

“I forgot,” she says. “Or, I mean. I knew. I knew we moved because of him. I knew my aunt had me in therapy because of him. But I didn’t really _remember_ until-“

“This bitch of a place,” Richie agrees, humorless.

She turns suddenly so they’re lying with their faces close together, bodies curving towards each other like parentheses. It’s only the fifth day of summer and already she’s started to freckle.

“I came by yesterday morning,” she says, “before Mike’s. I saw the For Sale sign.”

Richie rolls again so that his face is in the carpet. It’s made of some scratchy fiber and it smells like vacuum cleaner, burnt and electric. Bev prods at his back and he swats her hands away.

“Do the rest of the Losers know?”

“Just Bill,” he tells the carpet. He’s probably getting carpet fibers into his mouth wound. Eddie would have a panic attack. “And that was a mistake. Guess he’s getting a lot of that recently, huh? _Bill, what happened between us was a mistake-_ ”

“Richie,” Bev says, undeterred. She stops poking him and rubs his back instead, making little circles with her palms like Richie’s an overtired toddler and she’s trying to get him to fall asleep. “You gotta tell them.”

“Actually,” Richie says, “I super super don’t.”

He already knows how they will look at him because That Summer in the Neibolt House, he’d stooped down and found his own MISSING poster. They will consider him soberly, like _now that you mention it, Richie, you do look a little bit translucent_. Every action going heavy with _this is the last time._ Every conversation weighted with the strange knowledge that Richie won’t remember it soon.

“Don’t you want time to say goodbye?”

“Yeah,” Richie tells the carpet, “let me make a bunch of beautiful fucking memories that I’ll forget the second I cross state lines.”

“They’ll write to you.”

“We write you, too,” Richie says, and it’s more resentful than it means. “And we phone. It just rings and rings.”

“I’m sorry,” Bev says.

Richie rolls back over to stare at the ceiling because his glasses are pressing painfully into his nose. He’s thinking about the MISSING poster, about how frightened he was of his own absence. Missing was worse than dead.

“It’s not your fault.”

“Yeah, but it still rots.”

Kurt Cobain’s singing about one baby saying to another _I’m lucky to have met you_. Richie thinks that _rot_ is the right word for it. Everything about Derry is a slow and sinister rot, and eventually that will be the only part he remembers—how afraid he was, all the time.

“Tell me about something else,” he says, voice breaking a little. “I gotta- Something else.”

Bev reaches over and grips his hand, and then she tells him about learning to sew in Home Ec. and bumming cigarettes behind the movie theater with a girl called Kay and her after-school job at a record store, owned by the first real-life lesbians she’s ever known.

“You’re forgetting Coach Williams,” Richie says. “No way she isn’t getting rug burn from all the pussy she’s—“

“Beep _beep_!” Bev laughs. She sits up, thrusts the orange juice at him to shut him up. Richie gulps some obediently, the liquid cold and coppery against his swollen lip.

He waits until they’ve finished the orange juice and smoked another bowl and put on one of Bev’s aunt’s Patti Smith records, until he’s sitting between Bev’s knees while she puts tiny little braids into his hair, and then it bursts out:

“Is that where you got those papers from? The fuckin- dyke record shop?”

“The zines? Some of them,” Bev says carefully. Her fingers scrape against Richie’s hairline, comb back a curl. “What’d you think of them?”

“I don’t know.” 

He closes his eyes, lets himself enjoy the scrape of Bev’s nails against his scalp. For all the nudging and grabbing and prodding he does, Richie isn’t often touched in this deliberate and intimate way. He’s learned better than to let his hands linger, to let himself want- that.

“They made me sad,” he says eventually.

“Me and Kay,” Bev says, intent on her braiding, “have been going to some different meetings. A lot of things, actually. We’ve been doing- a lot together.”

“Oh,” says Richie.

“And it’s not because-“ she tugs at a curl too hard, then smooths over the spot with the pad of her thumb like an apology. “It’s not because of my dad or because I’m afraid of men, or whatever the fuck-“

“Okay,” says Richie.

“And it’s not about Bill because I didn’t even _remember_ Bill or- or _any_ of it. I just _wanted_ to.”

“Hey,” Richie says. He can’t turn his head in her grip, so instead he fumbles out a hand and pats her knee. “Hey, dude. You don’t have to defend it. You can kiss whoever you want, you know that? You’re Molly fucking Ringwald.”

She laughs a little tearfully and then rests her sharp chin against his shoulder for a minute. Richie holds his twitching rattling body as still as he can so that she can rest there.

“Thanks, Ducky,” Bev says quietly. She straightens, cards a hand through his hair. “You should keep growing your hair out. It’s sick. You’d look like fucking Patti.”

Richie swipes up the _Horses_ album cover and mugs beside Patti Smith. Bev pretends to swoon. She crowds Richie into the bathroom so he can survey her handiwork, a crown of little braids which almost makes his rat’s nest of hair look, like, intentional and tousled instead of slept-on.

“There are parts of leaving,” Bev begins slowly, eyes fixed on Richie’s reflection as they stand before the mirror, “that are okay. It’s- not everywhere’s Derry, Richie. Not every place is so small.”

Looking at her, even looking at her reflection, is more than Richie can manage. He keeps his eyes fixed to his own white face, his fat lip blooming like a sore—like something you can’t miss, can’t hide.

He says, “I can’t. No offense. I can’t talk about this. I’ll-“

He means to make some hyperbolic threat—he’ll start puking, he’ll fling himself off something tall—but instead he observes the Richie in the mirror starting to cry.

“Okay,” Bev’s reflection says. “Okay.”

…

Richie lives the next two weeks with a sort of humming ferocity, everything vibrating like a guitar string pulled too tight. He spends very little time at home. In the mornings he goes over to Bev’s to get high, and then they spend their days rattling around town, losing money at the arcade and lifting cigarettes from the pharmacy.

Between Bev’s aunt’s underdeveloped parenting instincts and Richie’s sister’s uninspired hiding spots for her alcohol, there is always something to pass around. They sneak a flask into the movie theater to spike XL sodas from the concession stand, spend an afternoon getting progressively drunker, theater-hopping between _Lethal Weapon 3_ and _Batman Returns_ and a third movie that Richie can’t remember at all, except to register his nauseous attraction to barely-clothed Brendan Fraser. He experiences a tilt into total dissociation as they step out of the dim theater into blinding, jarring afternoon sunlight.

Blacking out, Bev calls it, and Richie likes it so much that he does it again the next two days.

Mike’s grandfather makes him take the rope swing down, but there are other ways to chase that big, wide-open feeling of falling. They spend days at the quarry, leaping from higher and higher perches. Richie hurtles down a gulch in the Barrens on his bike, feeling it rattle apart under him, and then he climbs back up and leaves its skeleton down in the ditch.

“That was a fucking stupid thing to do,” says Eddie, and Richie grins at him with blood running down his chin from the re-opened cut on his lip.

“Don’t you want. To get your bike?” Bill asks, because bicycles are like loyal steeds to Bill. He probably puts a blanket over his at night, in case it gets cold.

Richie shakes his head. In six weeks, he won’t even miss it.

He can’t bring himself to look at the INFECTED FAGGOT PERSPECTIVES zine again, but Bev lets him flip through her pamphlets and photos from the record shop—Emma and Bonita the shop owners and a cross-eyed gray cat and Kay, holding a banana to her ear like a telephone. He lets Bev paint his nails and he’s so busy arguing with her about Courtney Love that his Piece of Shit Brain doesn’t even have time to panic.

“I don’t know why I can’t just say it,” he says. “None of this even counts. I won’t remember.”

He and Bev are sharing a cigarette behind the Hanscom house while the rest of the Losers argue over Ben’s very limited movie collection. Ben’s mom is working nightshift and Richie’s sister bought him a handle of vodka in exchange for a promise to stop stealing her stuff, so the house is noisy and full. Outside, it’s dark and cool and promising rain. Richie is working steadily towards blacking out, and he feels owl-eyed and strange staring out into the small backyard, into the yellow windows of the next house over.

“That’s what I’ve been _saying_ ,” Bev says, lighting a new cigarette.

“No,” Richie says. “Not about moving. The other- The other thing.”

“Oh,” Bev says.

She considers the cigarette and passes it off to Richie, charitably letting him have the first drag. It’s starting to rain, a hushed tapping on the roof overhead. Only their ankles and feet, sticking out from the overhang, get wet.

“I don’t think it goes away like that,” she says. “You’re still you. That’s still- a part of you.”

Richie shakes his head, tucks in his feet so they’ll stay dry. It’s one to thing to let Bev paint his nails, to imagine letting his hair grow long and curly. It’s one to thing to flip through Bev’s photos of her and Kay, faces pressed together to fit in the frame, and imagine the feeling of someone’s cheek against his own, round with smiling. It’s one thing to imagine taking Eddie to a record store, wandering the aisles together, always returning to each other’s sides, holding vinyl covers over their faces like strange masks—tragedy and comedy

But the thought _this is who I am forever_ is too big to hold in his Piece of Shit Brain. Even _this is who I am right now, at this moment_ is somewhat incomprehensible. It’s too big, too close—like trying to read a book through a telescope.

He says, “But it won’t matter so much. It won’t be _there_ all the time.”

Bev takes her time answering, like she’s trying to decide if she wants to argue with him, but before she can the door slides open and Eddie is accosting them.

“You guys gotta get back in here. Stan and Ben are pushing for _Dune_ and Bill is gonna fold, I can fucking tell. I need your votes.”

“What’s your platform?” Bev crosses her arms, teasingly matching Eddie’s serious tenor.

“Not fucking _Dune_ ,” he spits.

“ _Ferris Bueller_ ,” Richie says. “Or I’m walking.”

“That’s so masturbatory of you,” Eddie says. “We all know you only like that movie because you think _you’re_ Ferris.”

This is such a devastating and insightful blow that Richie can’t do anything except grin helplessly and make directionless grabby hands—not so much grabbing at anything, just wanting Eddie to come nearer.

“Eddie, baby,” he says, “I knew this day would come. Are you finally ready for me to teach you about the art of jerkin’-“

“ _Blade Runner_ ,” Bev says, standing. She hands off her cigarette to Richie. “Finish this for me? I’ll intervene.”

Richie is surprised when Eddie doesn’t immediately follow her back inside. Instead, he scuffs his sneakers and moves to sit beside him on the step, coughs a little bit.

“Okay,” Richie says, “you can’t get mad at me for smoking when I came all the way out here, into the rain. It’s not _my_ fault you followed me. You brought the mountain to Muhammed.”

“Bill thinks you and Bev are hooking up,” Eddie says abruptly. He is unmoved when this revelation causes Richie to inhale a ton of ash and cough violently. “Serves you right for smoking.”

“Me and- Bev?” Richie wheezes, pounding at his chest. “What the fuck?”

“I mean,” says Eddie, busily pulling up his stupid white socks, “you guys have been spending, like, a lot of time together.”

He’s not making eye contact, but his voice is unmistakably a little hurt. Richie stubs out the remnants of his cigarette, throat burning, feeling too drunk and too raw to sit this close to Eddie and think about Eddie, like, missing him.

“That’s stupid,” he says, a little hysterical. “That’s fucking- heteronormative.”

He doesn’t really know what this word means, only that he read it in one of Bev’s scary pamphlets, but it sounds impressive enough to shut Eddie up. He shrugs, stands.

“I didn’t say it,” he says. “I’m just saying Bill thinks-”

“Well he’s wrong,” Richie interrupts. He stands, too, and the sudden redistribution of gravity on his body makes him newly aware of how drunk he is. How dangerous it is to be standing in the rain with Eddie like this.

Eddie must see some of this panic register on his face because he reaches out and gets a good handful of Richie’s patterned shirt, like he’s prepared to yank him upright if needed.

“I missed you,” Richie says fast, feeling too drunk and too aware, suddenly, that in six weeks he will not know Eddie anymore. He will not remember he ever knew Eddie.

Eddie rolls his eyes and turns to open the backdoor. “You should drink some water. You’re not gonna remember anything tomorrow if you don’t slow down.”

“I mean it,” Richie insists, letting Eddie lead him back into Ben’s warm yellow kitchen. “I miss you.”

“Fucking stop avoiding me then,” Eddie says, but his grip moves from Richie’s shirt to his wrist. He goes real slow on the basement stairs, too, like he’s making sure Richie won’t trip.

They rejoin the other Losers to find that Eddie’s political machinations were all in vain, because stalwart Mike has joined the Dune Caucus and Bill—perhaps only to be contrary to Bev—has thrown his loyalty to Ben and Stan as well. Outnumbered, they settle in to watch _Dune_ for the fucking seventh time as Stan and Ben mouth along to the dialogue.

Despite having seen this movie far too many times, Richie can’t follow the plot at all because Eddie is still holding his wrist between the loose loop of his thumb and middle finger, and every second that he doesn’t let go is another ecstatic eternity in Richie’s Piece of Shit Brain. Then Eddie shifts next to him so the side of his face is pressing slightly against Richie’s shoulder and _nope nope nope_ —

“I need another fucking drink,” Richie announces, launching himself from the couch and towards the stairs, “if I’m gonna make it through this movie.”

“You said you liked it,” Ben objects.

“I liked it just fine _six watches ago_ , yeah.”

“Grab me one, too?” Bill says hopefully, and Richie points a finger at him in accusation.

“You made this buh-buh-bed, Buh-buh-Bill. Lay in it.”

“Don’t be a dick,” Bev objects.

Richie makes Bill an apology drink in the kitchen and then for good measure he takes two shots of vodka before heading back down, feeling sick and tightly-wound and disappointed in a way he can’t name.

He gives Bill his drink, puts his head in Stan’s prim, inhospitable lap and doesn’t turn his eyes to Eddie again, except to point at him in inquiry when he goes upstairs on another drink run.

Eddie shakes his head. “I’m good.”

Richie blacks out before the movie’s end, but that’s okay because he’s seen _Dune_ seven times before. And if he can’t remember this night come morning, then that’s okay, too. In six weeks, he won’t remember any of this.

…

Mike drives them home in the morning in his rattling red truck, a subdued and hungover group huddled in the truck bed. At Richie’s insistence, they let him off at the end of his block. This is an effort to stop anybody from seeing the FOR SALE sign out front, but Bill follows him down the street, along the sidewalk, across the lawn.

“I gotta. Gotta t-t-t. Gotta talk to you,” Bill says stubbornly, following him into the house.

“Fine,” Richie says, “but first I’m gonna puke a whole bunch. You can wait in my room.”

When Richie stumbles back into his room, Bill is standing in the midst of all the clutter, considering the stack of empty moving boxes that Richie’s mother keeps putting back in his room, no matter how many times Richie kicks them down the stairs.

“So you’re really. Gonna move,” Bill says.

“No,” Richie says sarcastically, swiping a shirt off his floor and giving it a sniff. It’s clean enough. He swaps it for his current one, which smells of cigarettes and puke. “We just like to put out the sign sometimes to seem emotionally unavailable. Curb appeal, you know.”

“I just mean,” Bill says. “My parents talk about it a lot. Moving. Somewhere that won’t remind us of.”

Richie pokes his head through the collar of the clean shirt, straightens his glasses, and looks at Bill in surprise. “You never said.”

“It’s just. Talk,” Bill says, gestures around Richie’s trashed room. “You n-n-never said.”

“You better not fucking tell anyone,” Richie says, so ferocious that it startles them both. Bill frowns at him, looking hurt.

“I’m not. I won’t. But everyone’s starting to- to wonder.”

“Nothing’s happening with me and Bev,” Richie says, annoyed, “if that’s what you’re wondering about. That shitshow’s between you and her, not me.”

“Stop being a dick,” Bill says, in the sharp and unencumbered way he talked That Summer. It seems to take him by surprise. He blinks and then he’s plain old Bill again, speaking in halting mouthfuls. “Let me talk. I’m trying to say.”

When Richie was a little kid, he used to glory in finishing Bill’s sentences when he stalled out, guessing “ball? boobs? bike?” in rapid fire while Bill tripped over “b-b-buh.” He used to say he talked so much easy, inspired shit because he was “talking for two.” He always secretly thought of this as a special part of their friendship—the kid who stammered and the kid who couldn’t shut up—until Bill stalled out on a fourth grade field trip and Richie started guessing and Stan said, “Let him finish.”

And Richie was hurt because Bill shot Stanley a grateful look and labored through his sentence uninterrupted, because he didn’t actually need Richie’s help at all. It was only Richie who needed to feel useful, essential, to feel that he’d be missed if he was gone.

He sits down in the middle of his shit-strewn floor and gestures at Bill with sarcastic grandeur. British Guy bids him, “The floor is yours, Mr. Chairman.”

Bill sits down, too. He takes his time beginning, mouth working like he’s trying to crowd his words into the right order. Part of Bill’s strange power is his slowness, his comfort in a silence that has Richie twitching and scratching like a bad dog.

“You gotta tell,” he says, “everyone. About the move. B-b-because right now everyone. Thinks you’re being a d-d-d. A dick.”

Another solid hit delivered by Bill Denbrough, ladies and gentleman. Richie is an unsquashable bug, but boy do they keep trying. Stamp, stamp, stamp. He laughs, but it’s a hurt sound, and Bill holds up a hand.

“Only ‘cause they don’t. Know _why_.”

“Oh, good,” Richie says, “I’m a dick with a tragic backstory. A dick with hidden depths.”

There’s a joke there somewhere about Richie’s dick having reached new depths in Bill’s _mom_ last night, or something vacant and low-hanging like that, but Richie doesn’t feel like he can summon a convincing delivery right now.

“Let me talk,” Bill says again, and then falls contradictorily silent.

Richie digs his thumbnail under a big scab on his knee, a remnant from his jump off the rope swing or his Death Ride into the ravine or maybe just a sidewalk scrape from one of the many nights where Richie can’t remember getting home. Immediately, blood begins to stream down his leg.

“St-st- _stop_ ,” Bill says, swats a hand at Richie. “That’s what. I mean. You’re acting like you d-d-d-d- fuck, _don’t_ care. About anything.”

When Richie doesn’t say anything, only continues to scratch at his scabby knees, Bill sighs and lays out his next talking point.

“Stan thinks you’re. Developing a drug problem.”

Richie presses his discarded t-shirt to his knee, watches the blood soak smoothly into the white cotton. The combination of red and white makes him feel a sort of distant urgency—somewhere a stove left burning, somewhere a half-told joke he meant to return to. He thinks he’s probably gonna need to puke a whole bunch more soon.

“Stan’s just pissed I’m not honoring the D.A.R.E. contracts we all signed in sixth grade,” he says, waves a hand vaguely. “ _Thou shalt not break written contracts, even those made when the undersigned was too young to know about the cool shit they were swearing off_ or whatever. It’s gonna break his heart when he finds out what I did to the chastity vow we both signed in Hebrew school.”

“Richie,” Bill says.

It’s a bit like Bill punching him in the face all over again, because the way Bill says _Richie_ is in just the same pleading, tired cadence that Richie’s parents take on when he’s really run them down. His friends aren’t supposed to sound like that. His friends aren’t supposed to get tired of him. He feels very young and transparent.

“Fuck off, Bill,” he says desperately. “What do you want me to do? Piss in a cup? Do you want a cup of my urine, Bill?”

“I’m not saying. That I agree with Stan,” Bill says. “Only that he doesn’t. They don’t know what you’re. Uh-uh-uh. Upset about. And it’s-“

“Pissing people off,” Richie says, because despite the second opinion from his optometrist and his ever-evolving astigmatism prescription, he’s not actually blind. “I get it. I’ll fucking- start shooting up between my toes. Eddie can check me for track marks, you know he’ll take any excuse to look at those freckles he says are cancerous.”

“F-freaking people _out_ ,” Bill says. “They’re worried. And I know I said I won’t tell. _And I won’t_ , stop looking at me like that. But don’t you think-“

Richie’s already shaking his head, dropping back amid the piles of laundry to stare at his ceiling. He’s never really considered it before; he was always in a hurry to get out of his room, to get to Stan’s or to the arcade or to the Losers’ clubhouse. And now in six weeks this won’t be his room or his ceiling anymore.

“Listen,” Bill says, “when Georgie died. All I did. All I _do_ is think about. The last things I said to him. How if I’d- If I’d known, I would ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-“

He stalls out for a while, dissolving into breathy syllables. Richie doesn’t try to guess at his words. But he sits back up and puts his chin on his bloodied knee, to show Bill that he’s listening. That he’s giving him time.

“I would’ve made it count,” Bill says eventually. He rests his chin against his own knee, mirrors Richie’s stance. “I’m not saying that to be. Noble or. My Life is Sadder Than Richie _._ I just think goodbyes are im. Important. Mine got taken away.”

Richie nudges out his foot so the rubber toe of his sneaker touches Bill’s. Both their toes bear Eddie Kaspbrak Originals, detailed in strokes of black Sharpie. Bill’s toe reads _sooner or later_. The other, Richie knows, reads _somewhere somehow_. Richie’s toe, less precisely penned, reads only GIANT FUCKING WASP.

“So you’re saying if I don’t tell my friends I’m moving, I’m on par with the fucking murder of your brother,” he says, but he kicks Bill very gently in a manner which conveys something softer, an apology. Bill kicks him back, forgiving.

“I’m saying,” Bill says, “if you leave without. Saying goodbye. Eddie will fu-fu-fucking frame you for murder, just to get you. Back in the state, probably.”

Richie finds this strangely touching. Then he thinks about telling Eddie. Then he has to put his head between his knees in the way Ben taught him, fighting off a wave of heavy nausea.

“Are you gonna-“

Richie says, “Yep, most definitely.”

Bill follows him to the bathroom and sits on the edge of the tub while Richie pukes some more. He passes Richie a dixie cup of water once he’s caught his breath. Richie rests his face on the cold porcelain toilet seat and closes his eyes.

Bill says, “You’ll feel better after.”

Richie’s not sure what _after_ means—after he throws up every ounce of alcohol in his body, after he tells the Losers that he’s leaving, after he leaves and forgets he’s left anyone behind to miss—but it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t really believe Bill anyway. Richie’s always caught in the terrible _now_ of things, and from where he’s sitting it’s very hard to believe in any _after_ at all. Maybe he will sit on this bathroom floor forever, spitting acid and never leaving, always remembering.

He says, “You gotta talk to Bev, man. She thinks you hate her.”

Bill sounds a little hurt. “I don’t hate her. I’m just- confused.”

“So’s she,” Richie says, and then he starts to laugh because that’s a funny joke. “So’m I. Aren’t we just a bunch of fucking confused individuals.”

Bill doesn’t get the joke, but that’s okay. Richie laughs for a while, until he feels recovered enough to lift his face from the toilet, fumble out a hand to flush.

“Me and her aren’t-“ he says, does a gross hand gesture so that Bill will grimace and look away. It’s easier without eyes on him. “I don’t like her like that. Any girl, actually. Probably.”

“Oh,” says Bill, and then he slides off the tub so that he’s sitting on the floor with Richie, crowding him with his knobby knees. His eyes are too big and solemn; Richie can’t stand to look. “Sh-should I hug you?”

“Probably not,” Richie says, feeling strange and hunched and insectoid. “It might be catching.”

“Shut up a minute,” Bill says kindly, digging his sharp chin into Richie’s neck and hugging him relentlessly. Richie shuts up a minute.

…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the zine Richie is so upset by is the real Dec/Jan 1992 Issue of "The Infected Faggot Perspectives." The cover is by Rick Cole. You can view a pdf of the whole zine and read more about early queer zines and AIDS activism HERE
> 
> Bill’s shoes, graffitied by Eddie, read "sooner or later… somewhere… somehow." This is a reference to the code of the Lone Ranger: “That sooner or later/ somewhere...somehow/ we must settle with the world/ and make payment for what we have taken.” The graffiti on Richie’s is meaningless, except that it made me think of Sufjan Steven’s The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades.
> 
> also, this whole fic is tremendously inspired/influenced by "In Fact, Everything's Got That Big Reverb Sound" by distopiary, especially the formatting of Bill's dialogue. if you haven't read this fic already, do yourself a favor and go devour it
> 
> thank you for reading. part 2 will hopefully be up next week. plz leave me a comment if you enjoyed and say hi on tumblr


	2. ii

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They are driving towards the coast, through Bangor towards Portland. “Not stopping ’til we hit the ocean,” Eddie says, and then amends. “Well, bathroom breaks. Also food, if you can stomach it.”
> 
> Eddie’s got a big book of maps open to Maine, with Derry circled in red and marked HOME. There’s a drugstore camera and a stack of photographs pulled right off Eddie’s wall, still sticky with tape on the back, of the Losers—marked in more of Eddie’s big and emphatic handwriting. BEV, BEN, BILL, MIKE, STANLEY. There’s a folded-up piece of notebook paper, too, marked all over in a younger Eddie’s childish scrawl. 
> 
> “Don’t read that,” he says when he catches Richie looking. “That’s private. I wrote it in case I ever forgot.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one's basically all Eddie and Richie and I love it a lot. also here's ur road trip, as promised 
> 
> content warning: alcohol use, a description of what is probably a drunken panic attack, some disturbing references to Mrs. K's emotional abuse of Eddie and her fixation on the AIDS crisis

Bill leaves and Richie means to go and talk to Eddie but instead he takes a disorienting nap on his bed and wakes to the strange angular light of afternoon, the stale taste of vomit, the heavy knowledge that he told Bill, that somebody _knows_. He goes to Bev’s house and she’s got an identical thousand yard stare, like maybe Bill made a visit to her this afternoon as well. Richie doesn’t ask. He takes the vodka when she passes it to him and puts on The Velvet Underground.

“This feels bleak,” Bev’s aunt says. She slices an orange for them, which seems to be the extent of her parental instincts—stopping Bev from getting scurvy. “Can I open the blinds?”

“No,” Bev says. “We’re going through something.”

“Adolescence is a trauma,” Richie tells Bev’s aunt. She makes a face like _can’t argue with that_ and goes to slice up some strawberries, too.

“I can’t tell Eds,” Richie says miserably. “He’ll be mad at me.”

“Eddie is always mad at you,” Bev says kindly. Richie shakes his head and sits up clumsily, feeling urgently that Bev has to understand.

“No, see, because- That’s because he can’t be mad at anyone else. Everywhere else, he’s gotta be- _yes mommy yes teacher I wear my socks up to my knees_. He needs somewhere to put it all.”

“An outlet,” Bev says.

“So I’ll take it,” Richie says, and then feels very vulnerable for having said it. He puts an orange peel in his mouth to flash Bev a broad waxy smile. “Also everything’s funnier when he’s riled up.”

Bev sits up, too, and she puts her hand very gently on Richie’s knee. He jerks away and then feels sorry, simultaneously longing for and cringing away from affection. In apology, he passes her the vodka. She takes it but doesn’t drink, watches him consideringly.

“You’re right,” she says, “he won’t be angry. He’ll be sad.”

“That’s worse,” Richie says hoarsely. Bev doesn’t disagree. They keep drinking.

The evening goes by in this dim and hazy way, and suddenly it’s dark and Richie is really, really fucked up and he hasn’t talked to Eddie and he hasn’t done anything today except puke and drink again and maybe halfway tell Bill that he doesn’t like girls, and he feels wretched and loathsome. A coward. Half a ghost already.

He means to go home, but the familiar sidewalks seem to have rearranged themselves under Richie’s feet and he keeps finding himself in dim, deserted places—the Paul Bunyan statue, shadowless in this darkness, and the unplugged arcade and the empty rustling corner of Neibolt Street. It’s a veritable Magical Mystery Tour of Richie Tozier’s Childhood Trauma. 

It’s not a surprise, then, when he finds himself standing outside Eddie’s house, caught in the gaze of the black-eyed windows. Eddie isn’t a trauma—he is gentle and deliberate amid Derry’s violent indifference—but this house is. Every night Richie’s stood on the sidewalk and watched Eddie approach the door and silently begged _don’t go in_ is a small and incurable tragedy.

It’s very late and Richie’s too fucked up to trust himself around Eddie, but he slips around back of the house anyway. Fiddles with the old clothesline that Mrs. Kaspbrak doesn’t use—she is skeptical of fresh air at best—until the rusty metal pulley _tap tap tap_ s against the wall.

Upstairs, a light goes on in Eddie’s window. A long moment later, the back door is easing open. Eddie doesn’t say anything, just moves aside to let Richie in, indicates with his chin the swimming light of the living room, where his mother sleeps before the television.

Up the stairs, then, in practiced silence. Richie thinks he could navigate these stairs in a blackout stupor, could probably scale them with his eyes closed without ever making a sound. Then he stands in the middle of the bedroom while Eddie moves busily, putting on a Talking Heads tape and then an electric fan to further drown out the sound of voices. Only then are they allowed to speak, and Eddie beats him to it:

“You look majorly fucked up.”

Richie can’t argue with this. He turns in place to survey Eddie’s half-lit room with slow solemnity—how he imagines he’d walk through an art gallery or a war memorial, maybe. Another place he won’t remember soon.

It’s a room without style or cohesion, a sort of clash between Eddie’s selves, and Richie is very fond of it. The matching twin bed and bureau set. The stacked orange crates full of records and comics and an enormous two-volume encyclopedia of anatomy—a gift from Stan for some past birthday. A modest shelf of awards from Eddie’s first year on the track team, one of many small rebellions against his mother. A big poster for a foreign movie Richie doesn’t know, salvaged from a covert dig through the bins of Eddie’s father’s stuff, before Mrs. K read about black mold and threw the rest away.

Eddie says suspiciously, “What?”

Richie shakes his head. He turns back and studies Eddie with the same strange ceremony. He’s in his socks and pajamas, and his face is flushed with sleep.

It’s hard to notice change on a face he sees every day. Except for the horrible time after Eddie broke his arm, Richie’s spent just about every day with Eddie, and somewhere amid those days they both got older. He wonders if it happened gradually or all at once—if one day Eddie woke up with a new face, and neither of them noticed.

That makes him feel frantic and unsteady. He hasn’t even left Derry and already he’s missing things.

Eddie seems to be getting unnerved by the silence because he folds his arms and gives Richie a wide berth as he crosses to sit on the bed. Then he crosses his legs, too, until he’s wound up entirely.

He says, “If you’re here for drugs, I’m not going to give you any. A lot of opiates are metabolized by the liver, you know. You shouldn’t be mixing.”

Richie is offended. Also, dizzy. He sits down on Eddie’s rug. “Is Stan just going around telling people I’m a junky?”

“No,” Eddie says, watching him. “So what? Just a social call?”

Richie can’t really decipher his tone. His fingers find an uneven patch of the rug to pick at. He shoots for flippancy and falls short, so it comes out sounding strained and earnest:

“I missed you.”

“Okay,” Eddie says, mouth working like he’s pissed. He does that hand slicing motion that means he’s trying not to get worked up, and Richie is hit with a big hot wave of loving him. “Okay, maybe that would mean a little more if you could- If you could tolerate my presence without being fucking blackout.”

“What,” Richie says. He goes up on his knees and makes a grab for Eddie’s ankle. Eddie jerks his feet away because he’s a petty bitch. “Don’t be stupid.”

“It’s not fair,” Eddie says, and pulls his legs up onto the bed so Richie can’t reach him. His tented knees mostly hide his face, so he’s all indignant voice and hurt eyebrows. “It’s not fair to me. You avoid me for days and then you get fucked up and say you miss me, like it’s _my_ fault-”

Richie is no longer an unsquashable bug. He is thoroughly crushed. He’s a horrible smudge at the bottom of someone’s shoe, one crooked antennae twitching weakly. For the first time he’s viciously glad that he’s leaving, that he’ll forget—because maybe in forgetting, he’ll become someone else. Someone he hates a little less.

“Eds, _no_ ,” he says, and this time he gets ahold of Eddie’s ankles. Eddie thrashes and kicks but Richie holds on, goes up on his knees until he’s sort of kneeling, supplicant, before him. “That’s _me_. That’s me, that’s not you.”

“I mean, I get it,” Eddie says in a smaller voice, and he’s stopped kicking now. His face is mostly hidden. “I won’t keep trying to- I’ll stop. I can stop.”

“Eds, listen,” Richie says, fast and desperate, because he can’t understand a thing Eddie is saying, except that he’s sad and he’s sad because of Richie. He squeezes Eddie’s ankles, bows his head against his shins so he doesn’t have to look him in the face while he says it. “Eddie. My dad is selling his practice. We’re moving in August. To Massachusetts.”

A big long quiet.

“That’s why,” Richie whispers eventually. “That’s why I’ve been- all of it.”

Eddie says, small, “Can you come up on the bed?”

Richie nods against Eddie’s legs. He lets go of his ankles and crawls up onto the bed, onto the thin blue quilt that’s been there forever. He’s not brave enough to look at Eddie so instead he stares into his own lap, watches his shorts dot with tears.

“How long?” Eddie asks.

“Six weeks. August something.”

“No, since you found out.”

“A few days before Bev got here.”

He breathes out. “You didn’t tell me.”

Richie just shakes his head because he can’t speak. He’s really drunk and his throat is tight and swollen and his voice will crack if he tries to talk.

Eddie hesitates. He touches Richie’s knee, just for a second. “Are you crying?”

Even as Richie shakes his head no, he makes a choked noise to the contrary. He keeps shaking his head, but he’s starting to cry really hard now and he thinks maybe Bill was wrong about feeling better after. This is a sadness that feels inexhaustible.

“Okay,” Eddie says, and then he says it again. “Okay. Just-“

A jostle of elbows and knees, and then Richie finds himself being hugged. Eddie’s hard chin is digging into his shoulder and Eddie’s hand is smoothing gently in his hair and Eddie’s mouth is saying _shhh shhh shhh_ into his neck.

It’s _so_ much. Richie’s all snotty so he has to open his mouth to breathe and when he opens his mouth, a horrible sob wrenches out. Drunk and breathless, he cries until he gags.

A voice is mumbling apologies—his own voice, slurred and awful. He doesn’t even know what he’s apologizing for, really—for leaving, for not telling, for letting Eddie touch him like this and liking it so much—only that it is important Eddie knows how sorry he is.Everything is strange and distorted and out of control. 

For a while, there’s only a terrible _now_. And then they’re in the after. Eddie is saying _shhh shhh shhh_ and Richie can breathe again. He ducks his face and wipes his nose on his shirt. There’s not even room for humiliation to register because there’s too much else—too much loving Eddie and hating himself and hating Derry and missing Derry and wanting nothing in the entire world except to lay down and let Eddie keep touching his hair.

“Lie down,” Eddie says eventually. Richie goes willingly, shaky and limp with crying, but he’s already mourning the loss of Eddie’s body heat, Eddie’s breath on his neck.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, shuts his eyes. Eddie doesn’t answer, only reaches over and removes Richie’s glasses.

“You’re really drunk,” he says. “Do you need to throw up?”

Richie considers, shakes his head no.

“I’ll get water,” Eddie says.

Richie loses time for a little bit—a combination of exhaustion and alcohol. He’s distantly aware of Eddie moving around the room, of Eddie bullying him into sitting up enough to drink a cup of water. Some time later, he blinks over to find Eddie unfurling a comforter on the floor.

“Who’s that for?”

“Me,” Eddie says. “Go to sleep, dumbass.”

“Wait,” Richie says stupidly. He tries to sit up and the world rocks alarmingly around him. “No. Can’t we share?“

Without his glasses, Eddie is mostly shape and smudge. Looking at him makes Richie’s throat ache with feeling. Eddie misunderstands his wince, gives him more water to drink.

“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable,” Eddie says while Richie takes slow queasy sips. “I know that you don’t- want that.”

Richie swallows, not understanding anything about this strange and swollen night except wanting Eddie. Always wanting Eddie. He’s already been stripped of any bit of pretense tonight. What’s a little more absolute desperation.

“Just to sleep,” he pleads, finds Eddie’s wrist and squeezes it. “Please?”

Eddie gently removes Richie’s hand. But he stoops, retrieves the comforter, and gets into the narrow twin bed. Richie means to tell him something important— _thank you_ , perhaps, or _I miss you all the time, every second_ —only to fall asleep while he’s still working up the courage.

…

Nothing that happens in the morning makes any sense. First, waking up in the very early morning to find Eddie’s face tucked into Richie’s neck. Then, waking again to Eddie’s very sharp elbows, Eddie’s voice saying _wake the fuck up, Ma left for church and we gotta be on the interstate at LEAST before she gets home_.

Richie goes and pukes in the bathroom. He gulps from the faucet and straightens to consider his reflection—eyes swollen, mouth red from the cold water, looking older than he used to. One day Richie woke up with a new face and he never noticed until just now. 

He doesn’t have time to start spiraling, though, because Eddie starts rapping on the door.

“Richie, let me in. I have painkillers for your hangover.”

Richie opens the door. Eddie thrusts a bottle of Ibuprofen at him, shoves past him to the medicine cabinet and starts filling a fanny pack with bandages and antiseptic swabs.

“I know the recommended dosage, but you should probably take three.”

 _“Edward_ ,” Richie puts a hand over his heart. Eddie flaps a hand impatiently, like he doesn’t have time for Richie to be faux-scandalized.

“I’m just saying, you’re not getting anything stronger than that today. I need you clearheaded if we’re gonna solve this.”

Richie follows him out of the bathroom and down the stairs, watching blankly as he shoulders a backpack.

“Solve what?”

“I mean,” Eddie says, throwing open the front door, “I’m not just going to let you fucking forget me, am I? Put some shoes on, dick.”

Richie goes to find his shoes.

…

Eddie explains his plan between muttered swears, groans of protest from the stick shift of Mike’s borrowed pickup truck, and a brief interlude where they pull over so Richie can puke into the grass along the highway.

They are driving towards the coast, through Bangor towards Portland. “Not stopping ’til we hit the ocean,” Eddie says, and then amends. “Well, bathroom breaks. Also food, if you can stomach it.”

He’s got a big book of maps open to Maine, with Derry circled in red and marked HOME. There’s a drugstore camera and a stack of photographs pulled right off Eddie’s wall, still sticky with tape on the back, of the Losers—marked in more of Eddie’s big and emphatic handwriting. BEV, BEN, BILL, MIKE, STANLEY. There’s a folded-up piece of notebook paper, too, marked all over in a younger Eddie’s childish scrawl.

“Don’t read that,” he says when he catches Richie looking. “That’s private. I wrote it in case I ever forgot.”

Eddie’s in charge of driving. He’s still got an uncanny sense of navigation, so the map in Richie’s lap is really a safety precaution more than anything else. In case they hit Bangor and lose themselves entirely. Richie’s in charge of drinking his Gatorade and picking the music, browsing through Mike’s very limited stash of cassette tapes.

He settles on a John Denver album, kinda corny and warm and comforting, nice for driving with the windows down even though Eddie protests about air pressure and the roar of the highway against his eardrums. They’re so busy arguing that they drive right out of Derry without even noticing, like one of those roadrunner cartoons—walking right off the edge of a cliff.

“Still remember?” Richie yells over the noise of the road.

“No,” Eddie says, deadpan. “I don’t know who you are. What’s the odometer say? Can you write that down?”

The purpose of this road trip, according to Eddie, is to gather data on The Forgetting. As the miles between them and Derry increase, does it creep in? Will it set in all at once? Is it a matter of distance or time?

“Once we understand it,” he says grimly, “we can beat it.”

Richie, hungover and dehydrated, feels a rush of affection so great it nearly bowls him over. He has to put his feet up on the dash to brace himself against it. The sun is slanting in through the windshield and John Denver sings about coming home to a place you’ve never been before, and Richie hasn’t forgotten. Not yet anyway.

At carefully recorded twenty-mile intervals, they quiz each other to test their memory on Derry and on the Losers: What’s the name of the waitress with the dead tooth at the diner? Andi. Which bird is on the cover of Stan’s bird book? A chickadee with a black cap. Who’s the only other name on the Street Fighter leaderboard beside Richie? Trick question, it’s ASSMAN which is also Richie but in disguise.

“Hey, dude,” Richie says, “is your mom gonna start filing Missing Person reports?”

Eddie makes a dismissive noise. “I left a very detailed note about where I was going and when to expect me back. That gives me twenty-four hours at least. She can’t reasonably call the cops and say I’m missing when I’ve told her exactly where I am.”

“That _is_ what I love about your mom,” Richie agrees. “Her reasonable nature. Also her cavernous vagina.”

“I’ll make you ride in the truck bed like a dog,” Eddie warns. And then, “Oh, Jesus, don’t-“

Too late: “So what you’re saying is you want me doggy-style.”

“You’re going to move away and forget about me,” Eddie says with a sort of calm and fervent conviction, “but I won’t forget. I’ll find you. And one day you’re going to come home and I’ll be sitting in your kitchen and your mom’s going to say _oh Richie! There’s someone I want you to meet! This is Eddie, he’s your new father._ And then I’ll poison you.”

“Mile thirty-seven,” Richie says. He pretends to scribble on the pad, holding it up to hide his grin of helpless adoration. “Subject EK has begun to exhibit behaviors of sexual aggression. Cheek status: still pinchable.”

Bev’s middle name? Elfrida. The name of Ben’s dog? Fiver. What’s the title of the movie poster Eddie’s got on his wall? _Lo smemorato di Collegno._ What’s the first cassette tape Richie ever lent to Eddie? A comedy album—The Steve Martin Brothers. What did Eddie get Richie for his sixth birthday? A Snoopy lunch tin.

They pull into a shoulder marked Scenic Overlook and Eddie uses the drugstore camera to take a picture of Richie under a sign for the Cumberland and Oxford Canal, with an innocent grin and his hand covering the C in CANAL. Richie takes a photo of Eddie sitting on the hood of Mike’s truck, peeling a clementine and passing him occasional slices. Then, thinking of the photo of Bev and Kay, he turns the camera around and presses his face close to Eddie’s so that they’ll both fit in frame. “Take a picture with me, Eds.”

“Stop saying _pitcher_. It’s _picture_ ,” Eddie says right as the flash goes off, so that his sneer of superior articulation will be immortalized forever. “You sound like a hick.”

Richie obligingly uses some clementine peel to give himself a missing tooth and talks in an increasingly broad redneck accent ’til the bit of peel falls out mid-sentence and Eddie has to stop scowling and start laughing.

The car smells sweetly of citrus after that, clementine juice lingering on both of their hands. They keep quizzing each other, although the questions shift from general Derry trivia to increasingly specific Richie And Eddie trivia—all the ways they know each other better than anyone else.

The name of Richie’s ratty, much-loved earless bunny? Tzippy, like the creature from _Where the Wild Things Are_. What television show did Eddie accidentally-on-purpose tape over the video of his own birth? DuckTales. What song has inexplicably made Richie cry on at least two separate occasions? Cheap Trick’s Surrender.

“Ask me about your child modeling days,” Richie suggests. “Ask me how many local ads you were in. Two. _And_ a Cutest Baby Contest in a Hannaford coupon circular.”

“I don’t know why you’re always trying to embarrass me about that. All I’m getting is that I was a fucking cute baby.”

“Still cute, Eddie Baby.”

Eddie smiles and hums a little in the back of his throat. As they near the shore, the trees fall away into squat, scrubby brush and dry grasses. The sky outside of Derry seems even bigger.

“Okay,” Richie says, “nicest thing I ever did for you. Besides giving you life.”

“You’re not my dad,” Eddie says. “You’re just fucking my mom.”

This makes Richie laugh so hard that his feet come _thunk_ ing down off the dashboard. The wind through the windows smells like salt and Eddie’s got a little smile on his face, too, like he’s pleased to get Richie laughing so hard.

He surprises Richie, then, by actually answering: “The summer before That Summer. I was getting really bad about germ stuff and I was freaking out because I stepped in something. A puddle, I think. You took my shoe from me and licked the fucking sole.”

Richie wasn’t expecting a sincere answer and he is staggered by it. He laughs to try and hide it. Eddie laughs, too, but then he falls back into a weird sort of quiet.

“I spent _all the time_ ,” he says, “sure that everything in the world was trying to kill me. And you were out there fucking- licking shoes and never washing your hands and _not dying_.”

“I actually think I got fucking nasty canker sores for a while after that,” Richie says, wanting desperately to grab Eddie’s hand from the stick shift. “Might be unrelated.”

“I’m just saying,” Eddie says, and he won’t turn his eyes off the road, “it meant a lot to me.”

“Eds,” Richie says. It comes out choked. He doesn’t quite succeed at a laugh, scrubs his hands across his face. “Don’t let me forget you.”

“Obviously not,” Eddie says. “Start looking for parking.”

…

There’s a blanket to sit on and a grocery bag full of clementines to share. Eddie grimly applies sunscreen to every inch of exposed skin, squints at Richie and speaks of skin cancer.

“You have some under your eye,” Richie says, indicates.

Eddie swipes impatiently, misses the streak of white lotion entirely. “Got it?”

“Got it,” Richie says, and loves him.

There are shells to collect, there is a shoreline to walk, there are a hundred different games of _do you remember_ to play. The ocean is resolutely freezing, but the sun is sharp and bright against the water, warming the back of Richie’s skull like a hand over his head. They play slippery games of tag and retreat until their skin wrinkles, and then Richie torments Eddie with his slimy pruny fingers, pinching at his cheeks, thrusting a finger into his mouth when he opens it to yell.

In their haste to get out of Derry before Eddie’s Ma came home from church, they neglected to pack swimsuits. They sprawl out across the blanket in their soaked shorts and let the sun bake them dry and stiff with salt.

Face buried in his arms, Eddie hums a song that Richie can’t recognize. It’s probably not The Forgetting, only a misremembered melody, but he prods Eddie in the ribs anyway, knuckles nudging into his sunwarm skin.

“What’s that song?”

“Tom Petty,” Eddie says, and he hums a little more until Richie knows it, too.

There is a little splintered boardwalk to wander and a weathered mural with holes to stick your face through. Eddie takes a picture of Richie with the body of a chesty mermaid. Richie takes a picture of Eddie with the body of a tattooed sailor.

They buy postcards from a little shop and lean against a boardwalk railing to fill them out. The scrape of pen against cratered wood as he writes EDS!!! reminds him of how it felt to dig a penknife into the Kissing Bridge. Back then, he thought maybe loving Eddie was like one his Voices—which looped incessantly through his head, demanding to be heard, until he tried them out on Stan or spoke them into a tape recorder. He thought he could exorcise it—all the loving Eddie—if only he could record it somehow.

“Here,” Eddie says, thrusts his postcard at Richie, “save me the postage.”

It’s a photo of an alligator with a little white bird perched on its back, adrift in a snotty green background. Eddie has labeled the bird YOU (ANNOYING) and the alligator ME (CRANKY). On the back, he’s written only SEE YOU LATER ALLIGATOR LOVE EDDIE.

“Not very heartfelt,” he says, pulse singing _love Eddie love Eddie love Eddie_. “You want this to be your last message to me?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Eddie says. He crowds into Richie’s space, smelling of sunscreen, to jab indignantly at his all-caps writing. “I said _see you later_. Because I will.”

Richie presses his face into Eddie’s sticky sun-hot neck, blows an annoying raspberry to hide how overwhelmed he is. He’s carved Eddie’s initials into the Kissing Bridge and a hundred crumpled notebook papers. He’s said it out loud a couple times when he’s certain he’s alone, unheard. It doesn’t go away. He thinks he could forget Eddie—he will, maybe—and still go on loving him interminably.

“Mine’s for you,” he says, once Eddie _augh_ s at the raspberry and shoves him away. “Don’t look. I’m not finished.”

Eddie plays along, because for all his protestation he is Richie’s greatest enabler. He swings up onto the boardwalk rail and kicks his feet and waits cheerfully while Richie tries to think of something to write. Some perfect joke, some perfect Voice.

In the end, he writes only _EDS!!! In case I forget to tell you: Thanks for taking me to the beach. Lots of other stuff too. In a while, crocodile._

Eddie doesn’t really smile when he reads it, but he holds the postcard by the edges like Richie’s mother is always lecturing him to do with family photos, so they don’t smudge. And he slides the postcard into his backpack real careful when they get back to their blanket.

They take turns rinsing off at the outdoor shower, and when Eddie makes alarmed noises about standing barefoot on the damp tile, Richie grandly spreads out his t-shirt for him to stand on. He’s going to be violently sunburned tomorrow, but Richie sort of relishes that. This afternoon will leave a trace on him. He will feel it for days.

…

Lobster rolls for dinner and a plastic cup of fries to share, soaked in vinegar ‘til Richie’s lips sting. His shirt is soaking so he puts his chin in his bare arms and lets Eddie tell him all the strange new ways his mother is trying to ruin his life. Alternating fleets of humidifiers and dehumidifiers. Inserts for his shoes because she’s certain he’s developing scoliosis. Nearly daily pamphlets on the AIDS epidemic.

“She’s gotta be just driving around collecting them at this point,” Eddie says, disgusted. “Going into youth centers and doctor’s offices. _No, no appointment. I’m just browsing your literature for new ways to emotionally stifle my son_.”

“Tell me you don’t read them.”

“Fuck no,” Eddie says. “I don’t think _she_ reads them. One of them said AIDS was caused by flu vaccines. I confronted her with that one, I thought she might see how stupid it was. But now she’s just reading up on homeopathic vaccines and fucking Manuka honey.” 

“Never let me call you neurotic again,” Richie says. He swipes a fry through vinegar, pushes the rest towards Eddie to finish. “It’s a wonder you’re so well-adjusted.”

Eddie scoffs, but his mouth makes a pleased shape as he finishes the fries. He props a knee up on the picnic bench and rests his chin there. Behind him, the sky is going orange as sherbet. He is too zealous with sunscreen to burn, but the sun’s coaxed out the freckles on his cheeks.

“I’d leave if I could,” he says. “I know that’s- I think it’d kill her. But if I knew I wouldn’t forget, I’d leave tomorrow.”

Richie believes him. Eddie isn’t a liar. One some of Richie’s most miserable days, they used to go down to the trainyard together and Eddie would watch the passing trains with a longing that left Richie senselessly angry, with no explanation and no outlet except to hurl rocks at the trains as they rattled past.

As young as they’d been, he had understood that Eddie wanted to leave. He had understood _why_ Eddie wanted to leave, but even that was not enough to salve the blow: that Eddie would go if he could, that Richie wasn’t reason enough to stay.

“Careful, Eds,” is all he says, “or I’ll start thinking your motives for this roadtrip aren’t completely altruistic.”

“You caught me,” Eddie says. “I’m really here to kill you and stash your body. Nobody in the world knows we’re here except us.”

Richie laughs, but he’s distracted by the strangeness of those words. They are two-hundred miles from Derry, standing at the edge of the ocean in a town where nobody knows them, where everyone in the world is a stranger except Eddie, next to him.

“I’m all yours,” he says. They could get back on the interstate. They could drive south until they hit another ocean.

Eddie’s mouth, red from the stinging vinegar, hangs a little bit open and his eyes are hot on Richie’s face like he’s had that same thought, that same flush of freedom.

“I told Mike we’d have the truck back in time for his deliveries tomorrow,” he says, a little breathless but still solid practical Eddie beneath it all.

“If it were any other person in the world,” Richie says sadly, “I’d say fuck ‘em and steal the truck. But _Mike_.”

 _“Mike,”_ Eddie agrees.

They gather the trash. Richie tosses the heel of his lobster roll to a one-eyed seagull he likes the looks of. Eddie brushes crumbs from his cut-offs, claps his hands together in a gesture of _well that’s that_ , and then continues to stand there looking thoughtful.

“What’s happening,” Richie says. “Is this an allergic reaction? Is your throat closing? Was your mom actually telling the truth about something?”

This is enough to return animation to Eddie’s still face. He snorts skeptically. “Fuck no,” he says. “I was just thinking. Let’s not go yet. Let’s stay a little longer.”

As if it’s a question. As if ten-year-old Richie would not have gotten on a train with Eddie in the trainyard if only he’d asked him to come along. As if sixteen-year-old Richie would not get into the truck this very second if Eddie said he didn’t want to go back.

“You’re the boss, Eds,” he says. “I’m just riding on your back, remember?”

They go back down to the beach and wander the shoreline until night swings shut over them, turning everything gray and half-ghostly. Eddie is mourning aloud for the third time that he didn’t bring his “water shoes” and Richie is accusing him of fucking with him because the whole point of water is _no shoes_ and Eddie is furiously telling Richie about a friend of his mother’s who stepped on a sea urchin and lost her leg and Richie is promising to pee on him if he steps on a sea urchin and Eddie is saying that’s _jellyfish_ and also _a myth_ and then Richie is threatening to pee on Eddie and Eddie forgets to be afraid of treading on something dangerous because he’s too busy running away.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, Richie thinks _nobody here knows us_ and he reaches over and takes Eddie’s hand. Eddie falters but doesn’t stop his diatribe on how just because urine is _sterile_ doesn’t mean it’s _healing._ He just keeps talking, threads his fingers between Richie’s to interlock them.

It’s a very small thing. Only two boys on a beach, walking so light as to go unnoticed. Two tiny birds on the back of some tremendous reptile.

…

After the first grope for Eddie’s hand, it feels simple as anything to put out his hand in the dim cab of the truck and find it again. Eddie doesn’t say anything, but he sits close to Richie on the bench seat so that his knees knock against the stick shift.

Richie wonders if this act of bravery is The Forgetting, the first evidence of Derry’s loosening hold on him. Maybe this is the evil thing’s way of keeping Richie away, by giving him what he wants; if so, he is shamed by how easily won he is.

“Hey,” he says, braking as the light flicks yellow ahead. Normally he takes yellow lights as a challenge, but tonight he is in no rush. “Do you feel different? Do you feel like you forgot?”

“No,” Eddie says. He’s got the book of maps open in his lap, the big circle around Derry labeling it as HOME. “I mean, I don’t want to go back. But that’s not- That’s just Derry.”

“Maybe we wouldn’t know, though,” Richie argues, because he’s always got to press at his bruises, because Eddie’s holding his hand and he’s not used to uncomplicated happiness. “Tell me something from That Summer. That’s what we’d forget first.”

Eddie doesn’t argue but an unhappy silence follows. He says eventually, “It wanted to- It asked to blow me. It said, I’ll do it for free.”

Richie thinks of the emaciated skeleton on the front of Bev’s zine. _Free to the infected_. He almost drops Eddie’s hand, except that Eddie’s gripping him tighter than ever. There’s a hint of his prepubescent voice, a high wheeze of asthma, when he asks, “Is that enough?”

It’s enough. Just saying Its name aloud is enough to turn the night around them menacing, to turn the dim shop windows to blank indifferent eyes.

“Yeah,” Richie says. “Sorry.”

“What about you?” Eddie asks, and for a terrible minute Richie thinks he’s asking about It, about the things It whispered to him. But he only says, “Do you feel different?”

“I don’t know,” Richie says.

He is behaving like a braver version of himself, maybe. Is that change? He hasn’t mastered gradual change—he wakes some mornings wracked with growing pains, feeling inches taller than the night before. Maybe that’s growing up—waking up one day to a self you don’t recognize.

Once they reach the interstate, he has to drop Eddie’s hand to guide the truck into the fast-moving traffic. They drive in quiet for a while. Eddie fiddles with the disposable camera, says “hey” and then snaps a picture the second Richie turns to look at him. “Got you.”

“I”m blind,” Richie says. “You’ve blinded me. Let me touch your face, Eddie. Come let me touch your face so I can feel how wracked with guilt and anguish you are. It’s the least you can do for me.”

He gropes sideways, finds Eddie’s cheek and pinches him. Finds Eddie’s nose and pinches it closed.

“The flash wasn’t even on,” Eddie says, voice slightly nasal because Richie’s still got his nose. “Do you know your new address yet? When I get these developed, I can have them mailed to you.”

“Sure,” Richie says. He lets go of Eddie’s nose, adopts his Rod Serling Voice. “An envelope full of pictures of people I don’t remember in my mailbox. Write something threatening on the back. Or put an X over my face like you’re putting out a hit on me. God, this is presenting some really unique opportunities to prank _myself_.”

Eddie is not quite as captivated by this new genre of comedy that Richie’s just invented. He bends to return the camera to his backpack, and when he straightens he’s not sitting so close to Richie anymore.

“Hey,” Richie says, and then feels too pathetic to say anything else.

“Don’t make jokes about it,” Eddie says eventually, stiff. He leans forward to mess with the radio, turning the dial too fast so the music comes and goes between swoops of static. “It’s not funny.”

“I know,” Richie says, sorry.

Eddie doesn’t say anything, just keeps fiddling with the radio. There’s a lapse of fuzz and then a snatch of a baseball game and then a deep-voiced man yelling about the coming of the Lord.

“Say, I say,” Richie booms in his best Foghorn Leghorn, glances sideways to ensure that Eddie’s scowling in displeasure. “Well there’s your proof right there, I say, right there. The day you find me funny, boy, is the day I know you done forgot-“

“I think you’re funny.” Eddie snaps. “I laugh at your jokes all the time. I just don’t like when you do the Voices and _you_ go away.”

This is so devastatingly insightful that Richie can only laugh, blink against the glare of headlights on his glasses. Once he feels secure that his voice won’t betray this sudden well of emotion—an unspeakable mix of humiliation and gratification—he points out:

“You know you just admitted to thinking I’m funny? I’ll never let this go.”

“Nobody will ever believe you,” Eddie says calmly. He is incalculably evil and the funniest person in the world. Also, he’s got freckles on his knees.

“Come back over here,” Richie begs. “Talk science to me, Dr. K. What’s the result of our afternoon’s findings?”

“You know I disagree with letting just _any old scientist_ call themselves a doctor,” Eddie grumbles, but he’s sliding back along the bench seat—closer than before, even, so his leg presses flush against Richie’s. The Foghorn Leghorn preacher is still yelling on the radio and Eddie glares, slaps the power button. “Why’s that shit still on?”

“I was being evangelized,” Richie says meekly.

“It can’t be distance,” Eddie says, ignoring him, “because we went all the way to Portland, past where Bev lives, and we still remember. So it’s got to be duration. That's good news, I think. That's better than instant amnesia.”

“So if we camped out on the beach a couple nights, we’d start forgetting. Stop glaring at me like that, I’m just _hypothesizing_ —I’m not actually making you camp.”

“Quiet, I’m writing that down,” Eddie says, ducking to find a pen and returning to press warm against Richie’s side.

“It makes sense,” Richie says. “Every time Bev comes back, she’s slower to remember. Because she’s been away for longer each time. Do you think that’s It? Or just fucking- brain trauma?”

He’s being flippant, but Eddie goes quiet and considering. Taps his pen against his mouth so it _click_ s against his front teeth.

“I don’t know,” he says. “You know in all my memories of my dad, he’s got hair?”

“Wish I could say the same,” Richie says. “Love me while I’m young and beautiful, Eds, because if Went’s hairline is any indication-“

“No, shut up, I’m saying. I’m saying sometimes I think I remember something about him—something he said to me or this time he tied a whole bunch of balloons to my wrist—and then I realize it’s from a story my mom told. Or a home movie. He went bald from the medication by the time I was two. He was bald when he died. I never saw him with hair except in pictures. Photo albums. But in all my memories, he’s got hair.”

“Because you want to remember him as healthy?”

“Because my memory is _wrong_ ,” Eddie says, hand slicing frustratedly. “Because it’s easier- it’s _nicer_ for my brain to be wrong. It’s easier to remember wrong, so I do.”

“So, both,” Richie says. He feels suddenly uneasy. “You’re saying it’s both.”

Eddie nods. “It wants us to forget, but also _we_ want to forget.”

“I don’t want to forget,” Richie says, a little too loud. It’s starting to rain and the lights of the highway go smudgy and white. “I don’t fucking want to forget.”

“Not consciously, you don’t,” Eddie says patiently.

“Not upside fucking down, either!”

“But, Richie, you’re telling me- You’re telling me you don’t sometimes forget how I broke my arm? That you couldn’t go days sometimes without thinking about it?”

“Sure, but I also don’t go around thinking about genocide or that time Moms had a miscarriage on my eighth birthday, Eds. ‘Cause it _sucks.”_

“You’re telling me if I asked you right now how I broke my arm-“

“It was coming at us,” he interrupts, furious. “You were screaming not to touch you and I put your arm back into place. It made a grinding sound. And then I grabbed your face and made you look at me, because that’s what you always did during scary movies. And I didn’t want you to be scared.”

Another terrible crescendo. It’s like the whole day, like this whole hazy summer has collapsed into this—bone against bone.

“Okay,” Eddie says, exhales like he’s a little shaken. He finds Richie’s hand on the stickshift and squeezes it. “Okay. I believe that you remember, but it’s- that’s because we’re together and because we’re actively _trying_ to remember. I’m talking about passive subconscious-“

“But we won’t _be_ together,” Richie says. He’s starting to laugh because he is really just one big old malfunction. The rain’s coming down like a drum of fingernails now and Eddie lets go of his hand and all the sticky sunlit hope of the day is gone. “We won’t be together so what’s the point, dude? You’re telling me my Piece of Shit Brain is gonna wipe itself anyway, so why’d we even leave fucking Derry if it’s so fucking hopeless?”

“I’m not saying it’s hopeless,” Eddie says, voice high. “Stop laughing, it’s freaking me out.”

“You’re freaking _me_ out.” It’s somewhere between a laugh and a wail. “I don’t want to forget. I _don’t_.”

“Okay,” Eddie says. “Okay.”

“Even if I have to remember that fucking clown for the rest of my life, I don’t want to forget.”

“Okay,” Eddie says. His hand rubs a careful circle between Richie’s shoulders. “I’m sorry.”

Then there’s just the percussive scrape of the wipers. Richie’s glad he’s driving because it gives him a place to fix his eyes, a place to grip. He’s always considered his brain to be a piece of shit, but he’s never before suspected it might be actively working against him—scrubbing out rough edges, putting hair back on fathers, knitting bones back together.

“We’ll keep working at this,” Eddie says. “We have time.”

They have a summer. Richie understands that summer can be expansive and elastic and long, but he also thinks of the strange stillness that came over Eddie at the beach—Let’s not go yet. Let’s stay a little longer—and knows it won’t be long enough.

The rain continues. Richie drives steadily and silently, watching Eddie fight drowsiness.

“You could sleep,” he says. “I can navigate from here. Pretty hard to fuck up driving in a straight line.”

“I’m awake,” Eddie says, eyes mostly closed. “And I saw your grades in geometry last semester. If anyone can do it-”

A catastrophic yawn. Richie jabs a finger into his open mouth, just to make Eddie sputter and gag.

“Fuck you,” he says. “I finished with an A in geometry, and- _Fuck_ , Stan’s gonna get valedictorian now, isn’t he? _Fuck_. That smug bastard.”

“You would’ve-“ Another yawn, smaller and muffled against his palm. Richie is crushed under loving him. “Would’ve quoted some stupid movie in your speech anyway. Or cursed.”

Richie starts to object, because only one of them has said _fuck_ in front of God and Rabbi Uris, and against every probability it wasn’t fucking Richie Tozier. But then he watches Eddie’s chin dip and jerk up, fighting sleep with every taut furious fiber in his body.

“Hey,” he says. “Go to sleep. I don’t mind.”

“I’m awake,” Eddie says again, very much not so. “I don’t wanna waste time with you.”

Richie wants to say, _here—lean on me_. He wants to drove slow and even, making only left turns, while Eddie sleeps on him. But already he is losing his former bravery, turning back into himself as the mile markers count down towards Derry. Fear creeps back in.

He says, “I’ll be right here.”

…

It’s nearing midnight when the truck rattles back into Derry. Everything is quiet and dark and still. There hasn’t been a curfew in Derry for three years now, but the old habit lingers—night comes and people shut themselves away. Like they are all trying, however unconsciously, not to rouse the sleeping thing. Even the truck seems to rattle less violently.

Richie takes them through the center of town, watches the reflection of the truck ripple across the DERRY IS CALLING window. Past the pharmacy, past the arcade, past the movie theater. Down the quiet street to park beside the Kaspbrak’s mailbox. Its flap hangs open like an indignant mouth—anticipating, Richie’s sure, the angry mother waiting outside.

“Eddie,” he says, touches him on his freckled knee. “Eds, wake up. We’re back.”

“Ow,” Eddie says, coming awake and resuming his general cantankery. “Why’d you let me sleep like that? You know I have neck problems.”

“I absolutely do not know that,” Richie says. “Oh wait, you’re a pain in _my_ neck. That’s funnier. Pretend I said that first.”

“I will not,” Eddie says. He shifts on the bench seat, stuffing the camera and the book of maps back into his backpack, but makes no move to leave the truck. Instead he sighs and sits back, lets his head drop back against the top of the seat. Asks the ceiling, “Are the lights on?”

Richie cranes his neck to consider the Kaspbrak house. He reckons he’s got more than the usual share of Haunted House Experience, having nearly died in one on several occasions, and still no place has ever given him the creeps like the Kaspbrak house. The staring windows and the hanging, stooped-over roof. The dim rooms and the living room wall lit feverish colors by the perpetual shopping channel. The smell of cold cream and menthol cough drops.

“Yeah,” he says. “Living room light’s on.”

“She wants us to start seeing a family therapist,” Eddie says, disgusted. “Which might be a good idea, if I didn’t know for a _fact_ that the last two therapists I saw were reporting back to her. _Has the absence of your father left you with confusing feelings towards other boys, Edward? Would you say you frequently experience rage, Edward? Why do you insist on rebelling against your mother’s care, Edward?_ Maybe because you keep calling me fucking _Edward_ , you hack. _”_

“God,” Richie says.

“It’s okay, Ben helped me draft letters of complaint to the Licensing Board,” Eddie says, like this makes it better.

“That gets me hot,” Richie says. He does some heavy breathing so that Eddie will elbow him. He does so obligingly. “Tell me you got it notarized.”

“That’s not what notary publics are for,” Eddie snaps. He fiddles around with his seatbelt, but doesn’t get out of the car. They watch the house for a while and the house watches them back. Richie thinks he sees a window sash twitch upstairs—probably imagined, but he kills the headlights anyway.

Then they sit in the dark together. Without the motor humming and grumbling, the silence feels smaller and closer.

“You know,” Eddie says, watching the house. Richie turns and watches his profile instead—his straight nose, the brave set of his mouth, a day’s worth of freckles standing out bright on his cheeks. “I always used to wish you’d tell me not to go inside.”

He turns and looks at Richie then, catches him staring. Stares right back. In the half-light, his face is a strange blend of the Eddie he’s always been and the Eddie he grew into when Richie wasn’t looking.

Richie says, mouth dry, “Don’t go inside.”

“Okay,” Eddie whispers.

A big long quiet. Richie’s hand moves on the stickshift. The truck slides away from the Kaspbrak house, from the one bright window.

They’ve only gone another block when Eddie says in a small and urgent voice, “Can you pull over for a second?”

Richie obeys, tilting between regular terror and another, pricklier kind of terror. Eddie doesn’t immediately speak again, but he also doesn’t bolt from the truck or demand Richie turn around and take him home. Just sits. Strangely, Richie thinks of Bill—of Stan saying _let him finish_ —and so he turns towards Eddie, keeps his mouth shut to show that he’s listening.

“I’ll miss you,” Eddie says.

Richie laughs, then feels sorry for it and claps a hand over his mouth. “That’s all?”

“No, fuck you, that’s not all,” Eddie says, offended. He goes up on his knees so that his head is bowed against the roof of the truck, so that he can jab a hand right in Richie’s face. “I’ll miss you and I don’t want you to go. I hadn’t said. Okay?”

“Okay,” Richie says. Eddie’s hand is still pointed at his face, so he reaches out and takes it very gently. “Hey, Eds?”

Eddie doesn’t answer, but seems to understand. He shuffles forward so his knees press against the side of Richie’s leg, so that he’s kneeling over him. Richie has to lift his chin to look him in the face. It’s dark and the headlights cast weird shadows and Richie knows him mostly by shape and suggestion—freckles and mouth and big expectant eyes.

“You don’t have to,” Eddie whispers nonsensically. Hovers over Richie but doesn’t move closer, doesn’t move away. “Only if you want.”

“I want,” Richie says, and then he laughs again because of how absurd and simple and frightening it is—how much he _wants_.

“Don’t laugh at me, dick,” Eddie mumbles, and then Richie kisses him.

It’s the biggest, wide-openest feeling of falling. It’s hurtling down into a ravine, feeling his bike shake apart beneath him. Richie is the black-silhouetted man on the front of _Vault of Horror_ , caught mid-stride in a beam of very yellow light.

“Wait,” Eddie tells his mouth. Sits back on his heels, gently removes Richie’s glasses. Then sits some more and looks at him until Richie starts to go twitchy and scratchy under the scrutiny. He says steadily, “It’s okay. I’m just looking.”

“I’m gonna die,” Richie suggests, “if you don’t come back here and kiss me.”

This has the unexpected and hysterical effect of making Eddie go red and indignant. He’s back on Richie in a second, kissing him with characteristic ferocity and yet somehow holding his face very, very sweetly. It’s the best thing Richie’s ever felt. He is so dizzy and bewildered that all he can do is find Eddie’s wrists, hold them for balance.

Around them, the night does not stir. No cars pass. Even the frightening things have a while longer to sleep. They kiss until they have to stop and gasp for breath, and then Eddie fumbles around for Richie’s glasses, slides them back up the bridge of his nose, his flushed face coming into sharp focus.

“Come back to mine?” Richie asks, and is surprised to find his voice still works, to find he still sounds the same in this new and strange reality in which he’s kissed Eddie.

“Obviously,” Eddie huffs. He shifts so he’s sitting on the bench seat, smaller than Richie once again, and not really that huffy at all. As they pull back onto the road, he rests his head very tentatively on Richie’s shoulder.

There’s a strange ceremony to it all: pulling down the drive, retrieving the key from beneath the mat, swinging silently into the quiet house, stepping past Richie’s father dozing before the TV, climbing the carpeted stairs. Richie closes his bedroom door slowly so it won’t click, then turns to switch on the light. Eddie, standing amid heaps of dirty clothes and untouched moving boxes, smiles at him.

They don’t touch again until Richie’s supplied Eddie with the only clean clothes in his pajama drawer, until they’ve changed out of their salt-stiff shorts and stood next to each other in the bathroom brushing their teeth. Richie offers to share his toothbrush, just to watch Eddie’s face journey into revulsion.

Back in the bedroom, Eddie makes him stand around and wait while he makes the bed, wrestling the top sheet and unearthing an upsetting number of stray socks.

“Do you sleep on top of your sheets like a soldier or something?” Richie asks, watching Eddie smooth the comforter. “We’re about to sleep in there, Sergeant Corporal.”

“It’s nicer to get into bed when it’s freshly made,” Eddie says, making neat hospital corners. “Also I’m trying not to freak out and I need to straighten something.”

“You’re the boss,” he says. He waits until Eddie’s pummeled the pillows into unrivaled fluffiness, then approaches slowly. Eddie doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move. Richie’s toes nudge against his. “Hey. Eds.”

Gently, he takes the pillow Eddie’s holding between their chests and tosses it onto the bed. Eddie allows this.

“I’ll miss you back,” he says. “I didn’t say, before.”

“I know you will,” Eddie says, because he’s a smug bastard. He puts his arms around Richie like a hug so his face is tucked into the collar of his shirt. When he speaks again, Richie can feel the hum of his throat against his collarbone. “Do you want me to sleep on the floor?”

“Fuck no,” Richie says. His pulse is ticking beneath his jaw. “Stay like this a second, though? I don’t want you to look at me while I say this part.”

Eddie makes some grumbles like this is an inconvenience, but his hands are digging real hard into Richie’s back like he’s got no intention of letting go.

Richie’s Piece of Shit Brain starts listing towards panic, but he thinks of the book of maps and the handwritten letter and the stacks of photographs stolen off Eddie’s wall—defense against their traitorous forgetful brains—and mentally he assembles his own line of defense. Photos of Bev’s bosses at the record shop and photos of Bev and Kay, faces pressed closed together, and the scrawl of LOVE EDDIE on the back of a postcard. Photos of other things, too, that haven’t happened yet—some happier future where Richie’s hair curls to his shoulders and he’s not so afraid all the time.

“So I’m probably, like. In love with you,” he says hoarsely.

Against Richie’s throat, Eddie asks, “Probably?”

Richie swallows, throat nudging against Eddie’s mouth. “Uh. Definitely.”

“I’m gonna look at you now,” Eddie says. “Okay?”

Richie can’t actually speak, but he nods a couple times. Eddie steps back just far enough to lift his face, not far enough to break the hug. He goes up on his toes and kisses Richie on the mouth, very soft and deliberate. His earlier intensity was Pure Eddie, but so is this—Eddie’s sweetness and his bravery. Richie has to close his eyes against it.

“C’mon,” Eddie says, stepping back. “You must be dead on your feet.”

This is such a very fussy, motherly expression and a big part of Richie wants to stop and tease Eddie for it and maybe make some snuffly, aggravating horse noises and blow a raspberry into Eddie’s face so he gets sprayed with spit, until he’s all riled up and they can go to bed in their usual bickering way—all meaningless elbows and swearwords. But some strange instinct takes over, and instead he’s thinking about being very young, home sick with the flu, and the gentle way his mother would rest her lips against his forehead, feeling for a temperature. He thinks he’d like to be touched with intention, without some guise of play-fighting.

He lets Eddie bully him into bed. It’s too hot for the coverlet but the sheets are cool against Richie’s increasingly angry sunburn and Eddie’s right—it’s nicer when the bed is freshly made.

It’s only a small twin bed and so there is the usual bumping of elbows, tangling of ankles, but then Eddie turns and passes his fingers through Richie’s hair. It’s very much not an accident. Richies breath stutters audibly and his skin sears in a way that has nothing to do with a sunburn.

“Is this okay?”

“Yeah,” Richie says, closes his eyes against the feeling of Eddie’s fingers in his hair. He could almost cry from it.

“Okay,” Eddie says, and then they lay together in close silence. Richie can tell when he falls asleep because his hand stills against his head. Then he lays awake a while longer and considers his bedroom ceiling, which has hung over him all his life, which he’s never given a second thought until yesterday.

Some part of him wants to get out of bed and find a notepad, start writing this down before he can forget, like some perfect punchline he’s thought of on the brink of sleep that he won’t remember in the morning. But it feels more important to lay very still. Like maybe if he’s still enough he can escape time’s notice entirely. Like maybe time will look the other way and let them sleep a little longer.

...

In the morning, Eddie is gone.

Richie stares at the ceiling for a little while and then he gets up in a panic to secure evidence that Eddie was ever really there. The neatly folded pajamas at the end of the bed, the absence of Mike’s truck in the driveway, and the absolute disastrous state of his hair are proof enough. So this isn’t The Forgetting. This isn’t Richie’s Piece of Shit Brain. This is only Richie Tozier, selfish piece of shit, telling Eddie he loves him—all the while knowing that Eddie’s had love used on him like a weapon all his life. Richie Tozier, selfish piece of shit, asking Eddie to stay—all the while knowing he will be gone in six weeks.

He’s spent a lot of this summer avoiding sadness, chasing altered states to escape sadness, but now it overtakes him all at once. A big old sad.

He can’t think of a single thing to do, so he gets out of bed and picks up Eddie’s stacked pajamas and puts them neatly into one of the empty moving boxes, just so he doesn’t have to look at them. Then a rumpled sweatshirt from under the desk. Folding it takes three attempts, but he puts it into the box as well.

He wonders what horrors Mrs. K met Eddie with at the door this morning—a cancer diagnosis or a home stool-sampling kit or maybe just a crowbar to the knees. Maybe Eddie will be bedridden for the rest of the summer and Richie can go and sit vigil by his sickbed until Eddie wakes up and tells him “I don’t love you back.” Or maybe tomorrow he will come by and they will go meet the Losers at the quarry and it will all be the same—roughhousing elbows and slippery ribcages under the water—except that each accidental, unintentional touch will mean “I don’t love you back” just the same.

A big old sad. Numbly, Richie fills a box. When it’s full, he closes the cardboard flaps and retrieves an empty one. Starts in on his drawer of winter clothes.

The morning leaks by in this way. When Richie finally sits back and looks around, his room is half-emptied and Stan’s paused in the doorway, looking strange like maybe he’s been saying Richie’s name for a while now. Richie puts down the stack of comics he’s sorting.

“How long have you been standing there?”

“Like a minute,” Stan says, still looking strange. “Are you okay?”

“I’m not high if that’s what you’re asking,” Richie says. He hasn’t really got the energy to be offended or even ironic. He’s all squashed flat. He wonders if he should put aside some of the comics for Stan and Eds; he’s got a couple good ones that he never even looks at anymore.

“That’s not what I meant,” Stan says. Then, mouth twitching with understated Stanley humor, “Bill says I have to stop being so judgmental while you’re in crisis.”

This is so funny that Richie laughs even though he doesn’t want to. Stan seems to take this as a victory; he steps into the room, sits down on one of the full moving boxes. Somewhat belatedly, Richie’s Piece of Shit Brain processes what Stan is saying and where Stan is sitting.

“Oh, shit,” he says.

“Bill didn’t tell,” Stan says, understanding. “Your mom called mine last night, asking if you were staying. I think she called Ben, too. She said you’re acting out because of the- the move. Are you really?”

“Acting out?” Richie says. “Constantly, Stanley.”

“Moving,” Stan says. He picks up a pair of slacks and starts folding them, stops. “Why are you packing these? No way they fit anymore.”

“Oh, yeah,” Richie says. He looks down and considers the shirt he’s folding—a tie-dyed specimen that he hasn’t worn since summer camp and prepubescence. “I guess we can start a trash pile. Did you tell her I was with you?”

“No, my mom wouldn’t lie for you,” Stan says. He starts tossing clothing into the trash pile without asking Richie’s consent. “Anyway Mike said he thought you ran away with Eddie.”

“Temporarily,” Richie says. “We came back. Do you want my comics? Promise you’ll remember your old friend Trashmouth Tozier while you’re jerkin’ it to The Thing’s sensuous cavities?”

“Don’t be gross,” Stan says blandly. He accepts the stack of comics and starts sorting through them, laying aside a couple that he wants for himself. “You’re really moving? It’s for sure?”

“For sure. Went’s selling the practice and everything,” Richie says. He bats Stan’s hand aside as he goes for another comic. “Save the _WildCats_ ones for Eddie. He likes them.”

Stanley obediently starts another pile for Eddie— _WildCats_ mostly and some cheesy detective comics that Eddie secretly loves—because he is orderly and generous and wonderful. Richie tries to resume folding, but his eyes keep returning to the comics. He thinks about how he used to really love comics and then one day he just stopped, and how soon he’s going to move away from all the people who loves and then one day he will stop loving them, too. It’s terrible to think about something as big and whole and heavy as love just disappearing from his brain one day, leaving only a raw cavity like a lost tooth.

“Bill and I are making a notebook,” Stan says abruptly, “of things to help you remember. I’m sure everyone will want to help, too. Can I have this _Spiderman_? It’s special edition.”

“All yours, Stanny baby,” Richie says dully. “Didn’t you do that before Bev left, too? She still goes radio silent nine months of the year.”

He finds a pair of dirty old sneakers under his bed, wrapped in a plastic trash bag. They’re crusted in dry dirt and the faint smell of sewage unlocks a memory—coming home from killing the clown, getting into the shower with all his clothes on. He’d tossed the clothes into the washer before Moms could ask too many questions, but he hadn’t known what to do with the shoes. In the end, he’d stuffed them into a plastic bag under his bed, just like he took those memories and stuffed them away to be forgotten.

“Trash pile,” Stan says sharply, tugging the shoes away like maybe he recognizes them, too. “Bev said she lost the notebook in the move.”

“Sure,” Richie says. “Just like all our letters get lost in the mail. Just like ours calls always drop.”

“So we’ll come visit. I’ll get my license soon.” Having picked Richie’s comics collection clean, Stan slides the diminished stack back to him. He is sitting prim and cross-legged amid the wreckage of the room, and somehow his shorts aren’t even wrinkled. Richie is walloped with affection for him and it only makes him sadder. “Now that we know what’s wrong, does this mean you’ll stop acting like a crazy person?”

“Doubtful. Do you want my Star Wars poster?”

Stan shakes his head, seeming startled even though he’s always been jealous of Richie’s Star Wars poster, a limited edition he won by calling into a radio station every morning for two weeks and racking up a phone bill that went down in Tozier family notoriety. 

“Stop bequeathing things to me, you’re not _dying_. You like that poster.”

Richie shrugs, feeling listless and stringy, like one good tug would unravel him entirely. He used to love comics and now he doesn’t, so who’s to say he won’t stop loving Star Wars next? Yesterday he told Eddie he loved him but maybe one day that will stop, too.

“Maybe I’ll forget I ever watched them,” he says. “That’s not so bad. You forget your hometown and all the people you love, _but_ you get to experience watching Star Wars for the first time again. I’m Marc Summers and this is _What Would You Do,_ asking the tough questions- _”_

“I’m not taking your poster,” Stan says. “And you’re not going to forget us. Me and Bill are writing it all down for you, I just said.”

Richie doesn’t really believe some notebook can forestall The Forgetting, but Stan is talking in such a Very Stanley manner—convincing and pragmatic and _disappointed that I even have to explain this to you, Richie_ —and who is he to argue with smart and prickly Stan, watcher of birds and sayer of _fuck_ at his own bar mitzvah?

He says, “Love you, Stan.”

“And don’t you forget it,” Stan says dryly, pulling books off Richie’s shelves. “I knew you never touched the Tolkien boxset I got for your birthday, dick. I’m taking this back.”

“Oh, so _now_ you want my bequeathals.”

“I love you, too,” Stan says abruptly, turning back from the bookshelf to point a finger. “I’m mad at you for not telling us about this sooner and for _lying_ about my birthday present, but we’re not gonna let you forget about us, okay?”

“Okay,” Richie says meekly. “Don’t take the books. Once I move to Massachusetts and have no friends anymore, I might have to take up reading so I don’t kill myself.”

“Not a funny joke,” Stanley says sternly, but he leans back against Richie’s bookshelf and takes out _Fellowship of the Ring_ and reads aloud in his quiet grave voice until Richie’s packed all his winter clothes and the afternoon light has shifted around them and Stanley’s mother calls and asks him to come home for dinner. 

“Also,” Richie’s sister Stephanie says, rolling her eyes at the tremendous burden of having to deliver such a multilayered message, “she wants to know if your other friend is here because his wacko fuckin’ mom’s been calling your house all day or something.”

“No, he’s not here,” Stanley says. He dog-ears his page and leaves it on Richie’s bed, gathers up his armful of comics and kicks Richie gently with the toe of his sneaker in farewell. “See you tomorrow. No more crazy stuff.”

Stephanie lingers in the doorway after Stanley’s left, peering around suspiciously like she thinks maybe Eddie’s stashed away in the closet or one of the moving boxes. Then she wrinkles her nose at the state of Richie’s room.

“You know we’ve got all summer,” she says. “I thought you were, like, _hell no we won’t go_ and now you’re living out of boxes?”

“Yeah, turns out I hate it here,” Richie says. “Leave me alone, I’m casting aside childhood and shit.”

“Wow,” she says, whistles in the way Richie hates because he’s never been able to master it, “the kid runs away for twelve hours and suddenly he’s Jack fucking Kerouac. You’re gonna love college, Rich.”

“The phone’s ringing again,” Richie says, because it is. “Fuck off.”

Stephanie rolls her eyes some more and fucks off, presumably to answer the phone or to unearth alcohol from one of her many unimaginative hiding spots. She’s back after a moment, though, looking even more dead-eyed and inconvenienced than ever before.

“Phone for you,” she says. “Goll-ee, maybe I should drop outta school and take up typing, since all I’m good for in this family’s being a goddamn receptionist.”

“You’re a regular bra-burner,” Richie tells her, but he gets up and slumps down the hall to the telephone, hoping it’s Bev calling to tell him she’s got more weed or perhaps The Great State of Massachusetts calling to tell him they haven’t got any vacancies and he better stay in Maine where he belongs.

It’s not—it’s Eddie.

“Eds?” Richie says, feeling again that strange, unsettling movie theater shift—darkness into light. “Where’re you-“

 _“I’m in fucking Boston!”_ Eddie yells into the phone, over a background hum of traffic and wind. _“I’m using a payphone, Richie, I’m going to get ringworm all down my face but I’m in Boston!”_

Richie blinks and his mouth makes some shapes.

“Why,” he says articulately, “the fuck?“

_“Because it’s another two hours to the Cape and I don’t trust Mike’s truck to get me there, so Boston will have to do. Are you there? Hello?”_

“I’m here,” Richie says. He doesn’t really understand what’s happening but his face is forming a smile anyway, because he can’t listen to Eddie’s unnecessarily loud Phone Voice without grinning stupidly. “Why didn’t you- You went without me? You didn’t say-“

 _“To prove that it wasn’t just because we were together yesterday,”_ Eddie says impatiently. _“But now I’m in Boston by myself and I didn’t forget, so you have no excuse. Ask me something. Ask me something!”_

Richie labors for a breath. “I thought you were- You _left_ , I thought you were freaked out about what I said last night. What’s-“

 _“What?”_ He’s annoyed. _“Richie, I’ve been trying to hold your hand all summer. You’re the one who was being weird. Did you really not pick that up?”_

“Eds, I am,” Richie says fervently, “so fucking dumb. You gotta know. So you’re saying you’re not- You don’t hate me?”

 _“Richie, I drove to Boston and called you on a public payphone, I obviously love you back_ ,” Eddie says impatiently. _“Ask me something. Ask me about your eye prescription.”_

“Why do you know my- You do?”

A brief silence. Then quieter, _“Yeah, dude.”_

“Eds, you gotta come back here,” Richie drops his voice to a whisper, puts his hand in his hair and grips hard, feeling dizzy and sweaty and bewildered. “You gotta come back so I can-“

 _“Okay, a mechanical voice just told me my quarters are about to expire,”_ Eddie cuts in urgently, _“but I think I got the sentiment and yeah. Yes. This wasn’t supposed to happen over the phone- I’m gonna get ringworm, Richie.”_

“ _Our_ ringworm,” Richie says happily, “which was born while you admitted you _love me_ -“

 _“I’ll keep driving,”_ Eddie warns _. “I’ll go to New York.”_

“No, come back,” Richie says, and he’s laughing. “Come home to me, Eds. Don’t forget me. Keep remembering.”

_“Okay, my quarters are gonna- I remember you. We’re gonna solve this. I love you. Bye.”_

“Bye,” Richie tells the phone. Listens to the dial tone for a while. Puts it back in the cradle. Feels that sensation of gripping the rope swing, sailing high enough to breach the barn door and swing out into the blue sky.

He goes back into his room, stepping over Stephanie’s legs where she’s sitting, as engrossed in _Fellowship of the Ring_ as Stan previously was. He retrieves yesterday’s shorts and digs through the pockets, pulls out the postcard from Eddie and reads the back again. Grins. Then he rummages through his backpack for a piece of notebook paper, smooths it out against his desk, and starts his own letter.

_Richie!!! In case you forget, here’s a couple reminders. Do you still remember Star Wars? If not, get to a video store fucking asap…_

“I used to love these books as a kid,” Stephanie says from the floor, some time later. “They totally hold up. Can I borrow this one?”

“Okay,” Richie says, pen in his mouth. “Don’t lose my page, though, I promised Stan I’d finish them. What’s the address for the new house? Moms wrote it down for me but I tore it up and ate it in protest.”

“Well, who am I to stand in the way of such brave activism,” Stephanie says. She stands and takes the looseleaf from Richie’s hand, turns it over, and scrawls a Massachusetts address across the back. “Are you writing letters to yourself?”

“It’s for a prank,” Richie says. “Don’t worry about it.”

“God, you’re such a little kid sometimes,” she says, kinda scrunches his hair fondly, and leaves him to finish his letter and seal it in an envelope addressed to the Great State of Massachusetts. Then he lays on his bed for a while and better acquaints himself with his bedroom ceiling, staring at the bumpy popcorn terrain and the moisture discoloration by the window until he’s got it memorized.

After dinner, maybe he’ll go lay on Bev's floor for a while. Maybe he’ll bully Bill into tagging along to the Barrens to resurrect his bicycle from the ravine where he left it. For the moment, he is content to lay here—feeling all messed up between sad and happy, feeling thirteen and sixteen and seventy all at once—and wait ’til somebody calls him for dinner.

He’s just thought of a question to ask Eddie, finally: _Don’t go home. Don’t go back there. Come with me._ Eddie’s already hung up—probably already on the road again, driving grimly back to the town and the house that he hates—but that’s okay. He will ask later. There’s time, a whole stretching summer of time, and Richie doesn’t think he’s likely to forget.

...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this could be canon-compliant if you want it to be, but in my mind this is a happier ending and they figure out how to beat The Forgetting
> 
> no obscure references this chapter, only a sheepish confession that the scene where Richie and Eddie are hugging is very much inspired by tumblr user cloud-official's incredible reddie artwork. also the whole drunken crying scene in the beginning owes a lot to the wonderful "recovery position" by fluorescentgrey
> 
> I hope you enjoyed and thanks for reading!! I'd love to hear fave lines/characters in the comments and also come say hi on on [tumblr](https://charactershoesfic.tumblr.com) to see some bonus artwork I did of Richie and Eddie's postcards to each other. 
> 
> cya later alligator etc


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